A Media Filled with Bimbos

MSNBC continues to comb the depths. From what you are about to see, I'd say Jon Stewart was perilously close to being correct in assuming equivalency between MSNBC and Fox.

Watch a totally clueless, disconnected panel of wealthy elitists discuss the Super Committee's failure and whether or not Barack Obama should be blamed for all of this. The participants on this panel are two Brits - a conservative journalist writing for the Financial Times and the privately educated jolly-hockey-sticks daughter of a lord of the realm (really, one can almost hear her snort when she laughs; an ageing trust fund babe, scion of the radical chic, whose every achievement has been bought and paid for by either Mommy, Daddy or her much older husband; and a corporate millionaire media hack, who's sucked at the Huffington tit (literally). The panel appeared to be moderated by Moon Unit Zappa, who's grown up to be Alex Wagner.

Like ... gag me with a spoon, you guys ... fer shur fer shur.

Prepare to be mesmerized by a wave of sheer political aptitude and intellectual acumen.

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Now ... take a long drink ...

So, there they all sat, eventually talking about a hyper-ventilating media when they were really ... well, doing a good job of acting the part of a hyper-ventilating media.

To begin with, I don't know why in hell the Brits were there. They certainly have problems of their own with which to contend. Gillian Tett, the bimbo on the left, is the US correspondent for the Financial Times, which is the paper of the fabled 1% in Britain, and whilst it isn't owned by Rupert Murdoch, it's sister publication, The Times of London, is.

I'm even more baffled that Imogen Lloyd Webber, the bimbo on the Right is even there, much less that she's a bona fide political commentator employed by MSNBC, in its latest round of gathering daughters of famous daddies. Already, MSNBC have offered employment to such charitable cases as Chelsea Clinton, late of Wall Street, Meghan McCain, blogette, and Jenna Bush, Dubya's diddum. Of course, all had a vast expanse of journalistic experience. Not.

At least, all of the above grew up directly in the path of politics and politicians, which is more than one can say for the Honourable Imogen Lloyd Webber (that's her title, since daddy is a lord). Here are her credentials:-

Lloyd Webber was educated at Queen's College, London and Girton College, Cambridge, where she majored in Modern Political History, specialising in the role of worldwide intelligence agencies and their impact on our times.[3] [4] She formed ILW Productions, a theatre production company, to discover new commercial theatre work by up and coming playwrights. Its debut show, Touched... For The Very First Time, written by Zoe Lewis, directed by Douglas Rintoul and starring Sadie Frost ran at the Trafalgar Studios in London's West End in 2009.

Her non-fiction book, The Single Girl's Guide, was published by Summersdale in the United Kingdom in April 2007, and as The Single Girl's Survival Guide by Skyhorse Publishing in the US in October 2007 and again in February 2011. She is currently adapting it into a screenplay for Lloyd Levin and is writing a new book.[5]

Lloyd Webber now lives in New York City where she is a contributor for MSNBC.

Daddy, by the way, is a Conservative, and her contribution to the discussion, about which, it was clear, she understood jack shite, was to wave her arms about and cry out about the fact that "in her little country, they did things differently."

Well, yes, dear, we know. We fought a Revolution some years ago to extricate ourselves from hereditary rule and taxation without representation.

Jesus Christ, if that weren't enough, we have Randolph Hearst's zombie, Mort Zuckerman, who somehow can't seem to decide if he'd rather be Canadian or American. Of one thing he is certain, however, and that's that he's having buyer's remorse about a black man in the White House. A black man who doesn't lead (because that's one thing black men have never done, right, Mort?) I love the big lie he promotes about everyone - as in everyone in the United States blaming the President for the failure of the Super Committee and the fact that this President couldn't harness Congress to do his will.

First, Mort, he truly didn't have the votes, and he had to contend with people like Joe Lieberman, your Zionist friend, and Ben Nelson on our side. Secondly, Mort, the debt ceiling brouhaha was something he really shouldn't have been forced into confronting. No President had done so previously. Congress just passed the thing. But the writing has always been on the wall since January 2009, from the GOP and from your ilk, one of whom is sitting on that panel with you, that Barack Obama should fail. The GOP did their job with a vengeance, and your fancy woman, Arianna, ratfucked all the scatterbrained EmoProgs, with a lot of help from MSNBC, most especially, the inarticulate Moon Unit Zappa clone sitting in the middle of that motley crew at the table. She worked for Queen Ratfucker Omnipotent of Medialand before being exiled to MSNBC ... duuuuuhhhh, you guys.

Mort wants a parliamentary system, where the power lies with the governing body and not the people. In Britain, when you vote, you don't vote for David Cameron or his bungy-nosed rival, Ed Milliband. You vote for your local representative. If his party happens to get the most seats, then the leader of that party, elected by the other elected reps of the same party and not the people, becomes Prime Minister. You'd really like that?

And finally, looking increasingly like a Marc Jacobs bag lady with a fifth of scotch hidden in the designer bag, Katrina vanden Heuvel, presumes to talk about the 99%, the poor, unfortunate underemployed, the little people, whilst out the other side of her mouth, she's just filled with helpful suggestions as to how the help President Obama should do his job. Because, like all wealthy white women who know nothing but somehow are regarded as political sages in this sorry media world, she just knows.

And, as ever, Katrina reaches for the stereotype when she accuses the British media of being "a media filled with hackers."

And since I've watched this via the wonders of "t'Internet," as they say here in the UK, I get to watch the beginning of this sham last, so the nature of its descent into elitist posing is brought home to me.

I'll share it with you, but it comes with some warnings:-

First, vanden Heuvel finally gets the purpose of the Super Committee, which was always ever going to fail. Zuckerman doesn't, and whilst he identifies himself as a Democrat, vanden Heuvel has enough nous about her to actually reveal him as what he truly is - a Joe Lieberman-style DINO. Kudos to her again, for pointing out to the lith-ping Conservative Brit apologiser for the Cameron government on her right, that Cameron's austerity measures actually meant that the British economy is now suffering negative growth and rising unemployment, especially amongst youth.

But I reserve my utter contempt for the cheerleader daughter of Lloyd Webber and Moon Unit Wagner. All Lloyd Webber could do was jump up and down, wave her arms and breathlessly rant about what she learned in school how America should be. At times she sounded like Horshack's English sister. Sit down. And Wagner waved back, making cutting movements in the air as she got increasingly more inarticulate, reverting to her usual bdyah-bdyeee-bdyaaah stutters and sound bytes.

I wanted to reach through the screens, grab a handful of hair together and bang their heads together, thus splitting the same brain cell they share.

Instead of a media full of hackers, as Britain supposedly has, we have a media full of bimbos.

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This one's for Alex. Spot the difference.

If Amos'n Andy Were White ...

Remember Amos'n Andy, that television show in the 1950s with an all-black cast? Did you ever wonder what Amos'n Andy and all their friends and associates would be like if they were white?

Here they are, from both sides of the political spectrum:-

Amos ... He was always the sensible one.

Andrew Brown (Andy) ... always with a big cigar.

Kingfish ... always the big mouth with the gift of the gab.

Sapphire, Kingfish's wife. Need I say more?

Mamma, Sapphire's mother and Kingfish's mother-in-law. You can just imagine.

Calhoun the Lawyer ... incompetent sheister.

Ruby Begonia ... does her name strike a familiar note?

Rush Welcomes Chris into the Mystic Brotherhood of Old White Racists

Oh, the joys of subtlety! Rush Limbaugh seems to be developing it into an art, however, because whilst he let spew a vile rant defending those NASCAR fans who booed the First Lady in Florida this weekend, he slipped in a sly wink of recognition in the direction of his "brother from a different mother," Chris Matthews.

You have to hear the clip:-



And here's the transcript:-

Bottom line, we don’t like being told what to eat; we don’t like being told how much to exercise; we don’t like being told what we’ve got to drive; we don’t like wasting money; we don’t like our economy being bankrupted. We don’t like 14% unemployment. The question is, what the hell is there to cheer for when Miss Obama and Ms. Biden show up? NASCAR people, as are most people in this country, are mature, tolerant people, who fully understand when they’re being insulted and condescended to. And they remember being called bitter clingers. They know that in their hearts the Obamas don’t like them. We’ve taken notice of this, as has, by the way, Chris Matthews. And a lot of congressional Democrats are also fully aware that the Obamas just don’t like a lot of people, and they don’t like hanging around a lot of people.

I’ll tell you something else. We don’t like paying millions of dollars for Mrs. Obama’s vacations. The NASCAR crowd doesn’t quite understand why when the husband and the wife are going to the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it’s a little bit of uppity-ism. First ladies have not been known to hop their own 757s four hours ahead of their husband when they’re both going to the same place.

Well, there you have it, folks. Rush acknowledges the lie Chris Matthews propagated this weekend about the Obamas not liking the political people around them, that they're unhappy in the White House, that they're ungrateful to the hordes of white people who ensured that they attained the White House. Matthews used the euphemistic word "smart" in referring to the Obamas.

I mean, what's worse than a black man who's not only smart, he's smarter than most white men, a smart black man who's made it to the ultimate pinnacle of power. At least Limbaugh didn't mince words with niceties. He actually used the word "uppity."

For both men, it seems that they have a problem with a black man in power and a black family ensconced in the White House. A few months ago, Limbaugh was bewailing Chris Matthews descent into political madness - after all, one needs to remember that sometimes, not too long ago, Chris used to sit in for Rush when Rush was away.

I guess Rush Limbaugh was really welcoming Chris home. I guess now Pat Buchanan won't actually be MSNBC's only resident racist anymore.

For Some on the Left "Unreasonable" Is a Euphemism (Nudge Nudge Wink Wink)

Since portions of the Left, those who chose to be led by the short and curlies by certain vociferous voices dubbed the "Professional Left," have spent the past three years nit-picking everything our current President hasn't done to your impossibly high standards, and since the whining and moaning and the accusatory fingers are about to be pointed at the President again, with the failure of the Super Committee, I just thought I'd give y'all a little bit of a modern history lesson.

You see, all y'all talk about the Right re-writing history along the lines that their current Teabagging heroes see it - you know, Paul Revere ringing those bells about the Second Amendment as he rode off to warn the British or John Quincy Adams being a Founding Father whilst he was still in his diapers or the Civil War not being about slavery - when we on the Left cut a fine hand in re-writing history the way we want to perceive it.

For example, we bought into the myth of George Bush's imperial Presidency hook, line and sinker. Bush got everything he wanted, simply by pushing it through Congress. Yep, ol'Dubya really mowed'em down. Duhhh ... are you forgetting Harriet Miers and Immigration Reform?

Another popular myth is the longing for a Clinton in the White House. Hillary, an extension to Bill, would give you, at best, Billary controlling things and stepping on Republicans in the White House now (sigh) or, at worst, it would be a national version of George and Lurleen Wallace.

The divine Jonathan Chait wrote a splediferous essay, appearing in the latest New York Magazine, tracing the history of liberals being unreasonable and inadvertantly trying to tear down any President coming from their side of the political spectrum. It's a great essay and well worth reading the entire thing, but I need to concentrate on Chait's initial observations and his attention to the Clinton years, as obviously, all of a sudden EmoProgs and pals are rewriting both Clintons as bona fide Progressives.

Chait writes:-

The cultural enthusiasm sparked by Obama’s candidacy drained away almost immediately after his election. All the passion now lies with the critics, and it is hard to find a liberal willing to muster any stronger support than halfhearted murmuring about the tough situation Obama inherited, or vague hope that maybe in a second term he can really start doing things.

He notes that the negativity from some tranches of the Progressive world began almost immediately - from 34 days into his Presidency, slightly more than a third of the way into the fabled One Hundred Days. The charge was led by Queen Ratfucker Omnipotent of Medialand, herself, Arianna Huffington - if, indeed, anyone ever really believed her Damascene conversion from raving neocon Newt babe to purring Progressive in the space of 24 hours. No surprise, she's admitted now that she won't vote for Obama in 2012 and will probably vote Republican. (Hint: that's a subtle call for "let's do all we can, dahlinks, to make sure Ron Paul gets the nomination.")

Chait asks why liberals (please: I prefer the word "Progressive" - liberals achieve, Progressives whine) are so disillusioned with the President, and comes to a remarkable conclusion, the first of the sensible PragProg writers to put this assertion in print. Pay close attention to the first paragraph; you'll see that even the most trusted of pundits sometimes really don't have a clue about what they're discussing. Bold print is mine:-

There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).

I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist.

Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or ­otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed.

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

So there you have it. First of all, that bastion of all-things-liberal-and-sensible, Rachel Maddow, actually doesn't really understand how the Senate works and the rules under which it functions, but that doesn't stop her from making an irresponsible remark like the one above, which many people take as ver batim truth. She went to Oxford, you know.

And, secondly, EmoProgs are comparing the current President with some unicorn fantasy of a Super President, one who is or was able to leap recalcitrant Congresses in a single bound, one who is or was more powerful than corrupt Supreme Court justice or faster than a filibustering Senator.

Thing is ... I don't ever remember disgruntled Democrats pining after Kennedy or Roosevelt during the Clinton years or even during the Carter years. In fact, only during Barack Obama's Administration, can I say I've heard otherwise intelligent people on the Left moan longingly for a President who was a third-way triangulator and brand him a real Progressive, rather than give any sort of credit to the President who is, probably, the most liberal Executive since Franklin Roosevelt.

Let's look at what Chait has to say about the fabled Clintons:-

One variant of liberal disappointment has taken the form of resurgent Clinton nostalgia. Hillary Clinton, removed from the undertow of partisan combat in her role as secretary of State, has enjoyed soaring approval ratings, while Bill has burnished his credentials with a book on fixing the economy. If Bill Clinton (or Hillary Clinton—admirers tend to blur their identities) were in charge, pine their devotees, they wouldn’t have rolled over on the economy. They’d have fought the Republicans on the stimulus and won. “If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama,” James Carville told a Christian Science Monitor breakfast last year, “he’d have two.” Clinton was known for his slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” and has become one repository for frustrated Democrats who believe Obama failed to attack the economic crisis with enough vigor. “No one ever had to tell Hillary that,” a bitter Clinton primary supporter recently remarked to the Daily Beast.

It is odd that Bill Clinton’s imagined role as ass-kicking economic savior has become the object of such extensive liberal fantasy. We don’t have to speculate as to what Clinton would have done if Republicans had blocked his economic stimulus. It actually happened. Clinton had campaigned promising a stimulus bill to alleviate widespread economic pain, with unemployment at 7.5 percent at the start of his term. Like Obama, Clinton needed a handful of Republican senators to pass it (Obama needed two Republican votes to break a filibuster, Clinton three). Clinton’s proposed stimulus was $19.5 billion. Unable to break a Republican filibuster, Clinton offered to pare it down to $15.4 billion. Republicans killed it anyway, creating an image of a Clinton administration in disarray.

Certainly, the circumstances faced by Clinton were different. (For one thing, the recession was far less deep and passed its worst point shortly after he took office, making the case for stimulus less urgent.) Still, nothing in this episode suggests Clinton possessed any special communicative or legislative skill that would have enabled him or his wife, had either held office in 2009, to pass a larger stimulus than the $787 billion bill Obama signed.

Bill Clinton’s election, following a dozen years of Republican presidencies, ushered in buoyant hopes of renewal. But liberals experienced his presidency as immediate and almost continuous deflation and cynicism. Clinton did enjoy one major triumph in his first year, when he passed a budget bill that raised the top tax rate, expanded the earned-income tax credit, created a new national-service program for graduates, and reformed other parts of the budget. This was the progressive apogee of the Clinton administration. Liberals at the time viewed it as a sad half-measure. The focus was on deficit reduction, not public investment, and each iteration of the legislation that worked its way through the congressional machinery emerged less inspiring than the last. “The Senate’s machinations on President Clinton’s budget plan have left many Democratic House members feeling angry and betrayed,” noted a New York Times editorial.

The rest of Clinton’s first two years consisted of a demoralizing procession of debacles and retreats. A series of Clinton appointments—Lani Guinier, Zoe Baird—came under conservative fire and were withdrawn in a panic. He steered his agenda toward right-of-center goals, like the North American Free Trade Agreement and a crime bill, serving only to alienate his liberal allies without dampening hysterical attacks from conservatives and the business lobby. Health-care reform collapsed entirely, in part because liberals refused to support a compromise final measure. Six months into Clinton’s presidency, after he had abandoned his effort to integrate gays into the military, Bob Herbert summarized what had already settled as the liberal narrative: “The disappointment and disillusionment with President Clinton are widespread … He doesn’t seem to understand that much of the disappointment and disillusionment is because he tries so hard to be liked by everyone.” Hardly anybody contested that portrait.

After Republicans swept the midterm elections, Clinton moved further rightward. He famously declared that “the era of big government is over” and brought in reptilian operator Dick Morris—not yet the right-wing conspiracy-monger seen on Fox News these days, but distinctly right of center—as his chief political adviser. He signed a welfare-reform bill containing such Draconian provisions that several liberals resigned from his administration in protest.

So the earned income tax credit Joan Walsh is always so quick to emphasize in her continuous Clinton defence, was really only about the only thing liberal Bill Clinton achieved during his two terms. Anybody else remember Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, sitting on his hands and saying nothing when Clinton negotiated and signed NAFTA? How about Ted Kennedy in the Senate and Saint Bernie Sanders, then in the House, voting for the biggest Social Security and Medicare cuts in the programs' history, when the Democrats held both Houses on the Hill? And now, now Sanders uses every opportunity possible to push the spin that the President is about to end, or at least, revamp, these programs beyond recognition?

There's the history lesson for all to see concerning the Clinton administration, the man white privilegist Chris Matthews calls "the President of the World." And then there's the eternal assessment of Clinton by the inimitable Miss Molly Ivins: "Only a fool or a Republican would ever think him a liberal."

Well, if the EmoProgs aren't Republicans, that only means this current crop could only be one thing and that they're looking fruitlessly for this ...

The Tea Party's (Brief) Moment of Sanity

Hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day, so I suppose the Tea Party is allowed at least one moment of coherent sanity, and it occurred recently in Memphis, when local Tea Party group sat down with representatives of Occupy Memphis to try to find common ground in their causes.

A political marriage between the Tea Party and the Progressive Left has been something earnestly and fondly sought by ratfucker Arianna Huffington, as well as such esteemed political sage hack Joe Scarborough, so you would have thought that any attempt at reconciling Tea Party objectives to those of the EmoProgs would have been one wet dream for Huffington and her trouble-making ilk.

After all, as she so frequently preached in 2009 and 2010, the Tea Party was just as fervently against corporate welfare (even though they were being financed by corporatists)as the EmoProgs were and are.

As the Faux Left MSNBC reports:-

Occupy Memphis member Mallory Pope had just finished telling a group of about 75 Tea Party followers Thursday night that politicians should not allow themselves to be influenced by lobbyists and unions when she received an unexpected invitation.

"It sounds to me that y'all ought to be joining us," said Jerry Rains, a 64-year-old computer programmer and Tea Party member. "You have a lot of the same goals we have, which is to take our country back."

This, of course, begs the question which country it is that which faction wants to take back, especially since the country in question for the Tea Party existed some fifty years ago, whilst the utopia imagined and idealised by the EmoProgs has yet to exist anyplace in the world.

Of course, there were bound to be differences, but are there? The Tea Party famously veer toward Libertarianism, states' rights and "Don't Tread on Me." And although the Occupy movement is disdainful of most politicians in general, the one politician they profess to admire is Ron Paul.

That can be dangerous to people who listen to only the hipster things Paul says and who don't listen to the rest of his rhetoric, which can be summed up in the time-honoured British philosophy of "I'm all right, Jack, fuck you" - economic survival of the fittest and all which that entails - not to mention the ubiquitous "property rights" agenda which Paul pushes.

All that aside, at the end of the event, the Tea Party offered the Occupiers some particularly sound advice, which they would be mete to follow:-

Page Gregory, a retiree in his 60s, stood and praised Pope and Tran for having the passion and courage to stand before the tea party group and address its questions.
Then he said the Occupy groups should go home and work within their community to try to bring about change.

"Get people elected," Gregory said.

(snip)

Tea Party members praised themselves for using the power of the vote to bring about the change they desired, and that the Occupy movement won't be successful until it does the same.

Look, as despicable as the Tea Party is, they deserve to pat themselves on the backs, because they achieved exactly the goals for which they aimed, even though it meant we now have a passel of inexperienced-bordering-on-ignorant legislators sitting in the House, as well as Rand Paul pacing around the Senate.

At the end of the day, they got out the vote, and in a year when more EmoProgs than not, sat on their haunches, sulked and took the advice of corporate media whores disguised as Left Wingers and operating under the Professional Left banner, who told them to stay at home and punish the President by not voting. And like the recalcitrant spoiled children, they did just that.

Whatever goals the Occupy movement seek to achieve, it's a safe bet to say that they can only be enacted politically, so the Tea Party's advice to go home to their communities and organise from the bottom up to get the right people reflecting those aims elected, was sound.

Funny that, because that was the same thing the President said when - in the bitter words of white privilegist Chris Matthews - he "sent us home." The President has always said that change begins bottom up and it begins with us.

Looks like the Tea Party listened to him.

What Thoreau, Gandhi and MLK Really Meant about Non-Violent Protest

It's not vocal, it's not as dramatic as a cracked head and it's not manning the barricades of the communes Les Miserables-style.

However, what UCal Davis's Chancellor Linda Katehi witnessed and endured was the perfect example of non-violent protest in the style espoused by Messrs Thoreau and Gandhi and Dr King - perfect, dignified and very disconcerting silence.



I thank my Facebook friend John Corzan for reminding me of something anyone engaging in the Occupy movement really should know - that in non-violent protest, sometimes one says it best, when one says nothing at all. It's called presence.

No, Chris, FLOTUS Doesn't Do Much at All, Does She?

Chris Matthews, suck THIS!

The First Lady honouring and interacting with USO families.

Nah, Chris ... she's not happy in the White House and not happy interacting with normal people - the ones you know all about.

Chris Matthews, sit down.