Another Scary but True Tale from Dumbfukistan

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare!” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

Any guesses as to whence the citizen gets his "News"?

Tricorythodes stygiatus

Come the Fourth of July attention around here turns to the spring creeks and the Trico hatch which comes off -- to a greater or lesser degree -- every morning until the first frost.

The hatches have been mostly quite good this year and I've burned a lot of gasoline and pissed away more than my fair share of mornings getting out of bed well before dawn and heading west to Pennsylvania for three hours of technical, intense, focused fishing followed by the long drive back.

I've been doing this for quite a number of years and caught my share of fish, but it is in the nature of fishing the Trico hatch that one never feels one has done as well as one ought to have. Fish are rising everywhere -- on some especially good days feeding as if they were baleen whales harvesting krill -- and you catch, say, three or four or five fish, not including the ones you merely prick and ones you break off. Occasionally you do a bit better; sometimes worse. It looks for all the world like it ought to be barrel shooting...but it ain't.

Not for me, at any rate. Honesty compels me to admit that I've frequently watched friends and strangers, upstream and down, do better than I. While the obvious conclusion might be that I'm just not all that good at it, I prefer to attribute my relative lack of success on those occasions to either an inferior location or the fact that none of the roughly two hundred flies in my trico box; purchased and home-tied; in sizes ranging from #22-#26; in an enormous array of pattern types, materials, and subtly differing colors...none of them are as good for that precise time and place as what the fellow out-fishing me is using. Fortunately -- like a duffer who hits the green with a long iron now and then -- I have just enough good days to allow me to cling to my illusions.

As an aside, people who have never fished with such small flies and the gossamer-fine 7x-9x tippets they require in order to allow them to drift properly (to say nothing of the virtual impossibility of threading 5x tippet through the eye of a #26 fly), wonder at the acuity of vision and exquisite touch they assume such fishing must require.

Tempted though I am to claim possession of such rarefied faculties, the simple truth is that the same conditions that make such fine terminal tackle necessary make its use feasible. The water is so smooth and slack that you are, in fact, able to see and track your tiny fly, assuming you cast well enough to know where it landed in the first place, and so clear that you can see the fish rise up, open its mouth and take. It does so deliberately and without haste, having all the time in the world as the fly drifts ever-so-slowly overhead, thus not triggering your startle reflex and allowing you to tighten up with the requisite gentleness.

There is a kind of rough rule of thumb for pattern selection. The males tend to emerge at/over night or very early in the morning and the females just after sun-up, so at 7:30, with the fish just beginning to rise and the spinner swarms just starting to form, a black bodied (or very dark brown; I've convinced myself that such minutiae matter sometimes) parachute with dun-length tails in #24 or #26 seems to be the choice. It's very likely to be the wrong choice, but one has to start somewhere.

By no later than 9:00 the spinners are starting to fall and with any luck at all the fish are steadily on the feed. Sometimes the fish seem more keyed in on males, in which case a spent-wing, black bodied (or very dark brown), long tailed pattern in #24 or #26 may work best. Sometimes, they seem to prefer the females, which calls for a #22 or #24 spent wing pattern with a white body (or green to mimic a pre-oviposting appearance; lots of controversy regarding whether the green version is either necessary or effective) with long tails and a robust black (or very dark brown) thorax.

The spinner wings are tied with antron, zelon, organza, hackle tips, CDC, Krystal Flash, "wonder wings" (a fairly fussy concoction made with hen hackle, created by Chauncy Lively and championed by Bob Miller), snow shoe hare foot fur...you name it. Sometimes they all seem to work. Sometimes one much better than another. Sometimes none of them do.

Typically, whatever you tie on, the first good cast and drift over a rising fish will result in anything from a good long look, to a skittish, slashing, short-strike, to a confident take. It goes downhill from there. The next cast over that fish -- assuming he didn't take the first time -- will be met with a brief, skeptical inspection. The next; complete indifference or a contemptuous little wriggle out of your fly's path. And by some mysterious process worthy of study by a more capable mind than my own, the fraudulence of your offering has been communicated to all the other trout in the area, so the promising reaction you received from the first fish on the first cast is not replicated should you turn your attention to another, notwithstanding that no fish conversation was observed taking place, and the second fish is distant enough from the first and at such a different angle that it hasn't yet seen either your line or fly.

Which of course raises the age-old conundrum of whether and when to change flies. It is easy to become convinced that your current offering is futile, but the fish are avidly feeding, the clock is ticking, and it takes time to change flies; sometimes a fair bit of time if the eye of your #24 fly is partially thread-obstructed and your eyes ain't what they used to be. Have any of you noticed, by the way, that the light conditions (shade versus sun, background, etc.) optimal for seeing the eye of your fly clearly are precisely the opposite of those that allow you to see the end of your tippet...and vice versa?

All too quickly, almost abruptly, you realize that it's over. The fish, so numerous minutes before, have -- sated -- seemingly vanished. So you wander the stream, looking for some last few stray risers or casting blind, trying to tempt them with Griffith's Gnats or ants or beetles before reluctantly concluding that you and the fish are done for the day and it's time to head home.

Michael Jackson Update

Still dead.

Happy Bastille Day!

In honor of the holiday, the first reader to correctly identify the above famous French people will win a free (!) year's subscription to Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes.

Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism

ETHICS IN ECONOMICS Benedict XVI signing his encyclical last week.


One can't help but wonder whether Catholic "conservatives" will embrace this aspect of the church's teachings with as much uncompromisting vigor as they embrace its anti-abortion stance.




By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: July 11, 2009

"...The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market..."

"...he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought..."


MUNICH — The collapse of Communism in the East two decades ago did not provide much of an opening for the Catholic Church to influence economic policy, but perhaps the near-collapse of Western capitalism will. Two German authors — one named Marx, the other his patron in Rome — are certainly hoping so.

The first is Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, who has written a best seller in Germany that he cheekily titled “Das Kapital” (and in which he addresses that other Marx — Karl — as “dear namesake”). The second is Pope Benedict XVI, who last week published his first papal encyclical on economic and social matters. It has a more gentle title, “Charity in Truth,” but is based on the same essential line of thinking. Indeed, Archbishop Marx had a hand in advising the pope on it, and a reading of the archbishop’s book helps explain the intellectual context in which the encyclical was composed.

The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market.

Unlike the 19th-century Marx, who thought organized religion was a trick played on the impoverished in order to control them, Archbishop Marx and other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are following a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this economic crisis as a moment when the church’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

Archbishop Marx has already drawn a following in Germany by arguing that capitalism needs, in a grave way, the ethical underpinnings of Catholicism. The alternative, he argues, is that the post-crisis world will fall back into furious turbo-capitalism, or, alternatively, experience a renaissance of Marxist ideology based on atheism and class divisions.

“There is no way back into an old world,” Archbishop Marx said in a recent interview, before the encyclical was issued. “We have to affirm this world, but critically.”

Catholic voices have long had influence on the debate in the West about social justice, but never as much as the church would have wished. That reflected the enduring challenge of devising alternative policies, rather than simply criticizing secular authorities.

Pope John Paul II, a Pole with an intuitive feel for Communism’s injustices, was an important voice in bringing that system down. But he had to watch in the 1990s as Eastern Europe embraced Communism’s polar opposite — a rather pure form of secular capitalism, instead of any Catholic-influenced middle way.

“John Paul II was often very clear what he was against: He was against unbridled capitalism and the kind of socialism of the Soviet sphere,” said John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter Vatican watcher. “What he was for was less clear.”

Now Archbishop Marx, who at 55 occupies an ecclesiastical perch once held by Benedict, is trying to wriggle out of that intellectual straitjacket.

With his talent for turning a provocative phrase, he has more in common stylistically with the evangelist St. Paul or the philosophes, who popularized Enlightenment thought, than with Karl, who ground out his dense texts from exile in London. After beginning his book puckishly by addressing Karl Marx personally, the archbishop races through 200 years of Western economic history in a way that pays tribute to Karl’s core analytical conclusion — that capitalism embodies contradictions that threaten the system itself.

But he also makes it clear he is no Communist. He admires Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a 19th-century writer who put Catholic theory into practice as a member of Germany’s first national Parliament in 1848, and later became a bishop and a fervent critic of Karl Marx.

The gregarious Archbishop Marx has cut a profile in the German business community for his willingness to walk into a roomful of executives and raise the roof. (“Are you marionettes?” he once asked a manager who protested that markets sometimes dictate unethical actions.)

In his book, which was published last fall, he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought.

On the first point, Archbishop Marx is in good, cosmopolitan company; many officials, from New York to London to Beijing, are calling these days for a world in greater regulatory harmony, though the specifics may be hard to agree upon. He sounds considerably more German when exhorting the world to create, or recast, the welfare state. People need the welfare state before they “can give themselves over to the very strenuous and sometimes very risky games of the market economy,” Archbishop Marx said. The burdens of aging, illness or unemployment “need to be borne collectively,” he added.

In support of his argument, the archbishop calls for a “global social market economy,” based on a concept familiar to Germans as the model for their own postwar system.

Of course, the archbishop says he realizes that a European’s ideal of welfare states and border-straddling institutions might not have universal appeal. At the end of his book, he quotes Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who has said, “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself, unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantly change that model because we are not the world.”

Neither, he might have added, is the Roman Catholic church.

The Pissed-Off Red Necks' Avatar

The following piece by Frank Rich gets it about right. The only question is how much uglier things will become.

"...No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party...It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it..."


"...Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind..."

"...wrote one fan. 'I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?' Another called for a new American revolution, promising 'there will be blood.'..."

"...She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her..."





By FRANK RICH
Published: July 11, 2009

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.
The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)
The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.

The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork.

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

Breaking news!!

Michael Jackson still dead.

Further Adventures of President Small Cute Dog

President Small Cute Dog - Part II

Ahh! Them was the days!!

Dumbfuckistan Lives On ~or~ Fuck the South, Part II

These maps are from the post election period in 2004 when it seemed the country might be lost for good and every sane person I knew was seriously considering emigrating. Since Obama's election many are cautiously optimistic, but it still feels like Dumbfuckistan to me.

As recently as 2004, more than half the voters in this country thought Bush had done a bang-up job in his first term and in 2008, after four more nightmare years and the worst economic times in the better part of a century, almost half the people in this country still voted for McCain/Palin (!) and a continuation of Bush's policies. This was after he: turned a record surplus into a record deficit; lied us into a war that's projected to cost about 2 trillion dollars and counting, has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraquis, and has proved to be a jihadi recruiter's dream; prosecuted said war with mind-boggling ineptitude; gutted environmental regulations, usually in secret, sometimes literally in the middle of the night; presided over a massive, unprecedented upward transference of wealth; declared war on science, data and intellectualism; tortured people who turned out to be guilty of absolutely nothing; enabled the banks to engage in a massively leveraged Ponzi scheme; and claimed he got his marching orders from God--which should seriously offend anyone who believes in Him.

And after all that, do you know when -- and only when -- the tipping point was finally reached and our enlightened populace finally turned on Boy George in significant enough numbers to make the election of a rational, sentient being a possibility? When gas prices went up toward the very end of his term.

"Bankrupt the country? Hey; math's hard and shit happens. Steal from the poor and give to the rich? As long's ah get mah $12 a year tax cut ah'm happy. No weapons of mass destruction? Hell, they'll turn up anyday. Slaughter innocents, destroy the planet? No problemo. But mess with mah god-given-right to drive mah Saudi Utility Vehicle to the mall for cheap and by-god you've gone too far, son".

Truly a nation of moral and intellectual giants.

Fuck the South

Note: I did not write the following extremely funny, obscene, hyperbolic rant (I'd love to take credit for it) but rather it was written by an author whose identity is unknown to me. It was making the rounds shortly after one of the most shameful episodes in recent history; the re-election of George W. Bush. I mean, you had to be pretty damn obtuse to vote for him the first time...but the second?! A fucking moron.

To my suthrin friends: I'm well aware that not everyone in the south is an imbecile nor everyone in the north enlightened. If the attitudes lampooned don't apply, this ain't aimed at you. If they do; it is.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs.

Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula. Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.

Sarah’s Straight Talk

Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way. When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too.

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time ... to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

Sarah Barracuda made her big announcement Friday afternoon on the lawn of her home to an audience that appeared to include only Todd, the kids and the next-door neighbors. Smiling manically, she looked like a parody of the woman who knocked the Republicans dead at their convention. She babbled about her parents’ refrigerator magnet, which apparently had a lot of wise advice. And she recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to ... resign.

“Life is about choices!” declared the nation’s most anti-choice politician.

People, what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state?

The timing of Palin’s announcement was extremely peculiar. Not only did she interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead, she delivered her big news just as the nation was settling into Fourth of July celebrations. You’d have thought she didn’t want us to notice.

“I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity,” she said in a fairly typical moment. “I choose not to tear down and waste precious time, but to build up this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic free people!”

Palin has a year and a half left to go in her term of office. The political world had been wondering whether she’d run for re-election. The answer is no. And furthermore, it turns out that Palin believes that the only way her administration can “continue without interruption” is for her to end it.

Anyhow, no point in wasting precious time.

One underlying theme in Palin’s remarks was that many ethics complaints have been filed against her on issues ranging from her alleged attempts to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state troopers to charging Alaska for her children’s travel expenses.

Perhaps there is some new and interesting scandal that Palin has yet to let us in on. (If so, I hope it involves a soul mate.) Otherwise, it would appear that this is all about her desire to start raising money and setting up operations for a presidential run in 2012. Her fans immediately interpreted the resignation as a canny move to get her back down to the lower 48, with as much time on her hands as Mitt Romney. (Mary Matalin called it “brilliant.”)

Palin was the subject of a devastating article in this month’s Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, who wrote that McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And there is no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around, she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy.

So if she’s starting to run, it will be as the same reporter-avoiding, generalization-spouting underachiever that she was last time around.
Now we know she not only doesn’t have the concentration to read a policy paper, she can’t focus long enough to finish the job she was hired to do.

On Friday, Palin said that finishing out her term would be just too easy. “Many just accept that lame-duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck and ‘milk it.’ I’m not putting Alaska through that,” she said.

Apparently, she’s going to put the rest of us through it instead.

~Gail Collins