Happy Hour: Bush Tax Cuts Get Donkey Punched

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Cheers!

You know, it's been tough trying to be positive about how my fellow Democrats have been doing in congress lately. We get clobbered in the mid-term elections ceding control of the House and having the Senate majority trimmed to a sparse majority of 53. We manage to pass a watered-down version of the revolutionary healthcare bill, but Don't Ask-Don't Tell is not yet repealed; the DREAM Act hasn't yet seen the light of day; Clean Energy continues to be hobbled by big business interests; and we still have combat troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's enough to make a guy take up drinking, so it's a good thing I've been doing it for a while.

However, every now and then something happens that brings a smile to my face, and reaffirms my belief that today's Democratic Party actually stands for something, the way it used to when my brothers ran the show. Today was one of those days when the Donkeys in the House of Representatives took a collective sip of courage, stood up to the bullying of the Republicans, and voted to reject the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, while keeping the current cuts for middle-class and working Americans in place.

This is a significant show of spine by the Dems not seen since Tip O'Neill would stomp through the House commissary, drinking other fellas' milkshakes. And, it calls the bluff on the GOP, who held working-class Americans hostage by threatening to oppose the extension of the unemployment benefits for long-term out of work Americans unless the rich got their tax cut. 

Naturally, the Republicans will squeal like stuck pigs about this.  They'll lie about how the Democrats want to hike taxes and spread fear about how this is going to further harm the economy.  Their argument has been that giving the wealthy their tax cut stimulates the economy because as the wealthy spend their money it will create jobs.  What they don't say is that the wealthy will use the extra money to buy monocles, light their cigars with $100 bills, and pay whores to indulge their unspeakable repressed perversions.

Republicans will also just ignore the fact that passing this tax cut extension while simultaneously extending the unemployment benefits would really kill the economy by increasing the defecit even further.  They'll also forget to mention that we've already been enjoying this tax break for the past 6 years or so, and it hasn't yet resulted in job growth or economic prosperity.

In fact, we've already had about 30 years of this nonsense and the economy (for regular Americans) has been steadily deteriorating since "Trickle Down" was first introduced by Reagan in 1980. It didn't work then, and it's not going to magically work now.

Which begs the question: why are the Republicans so eager to see the cut extended? 

Well, there's the fact that the people who would benefit most from this extension are the ones pulling the strings of the GOP.  But that's only part of it.  They know quite well that extending the tax cuts is a bum deal that would ruin the economy and leave the US in even worse shape two years from now.  In fact, they're counting on it.  They realize that their best chance to unseat Obama in 2012 will be if the economy has continued to deteriorate.  So they are more than willing to inflict more hardship if it buys them the presidency.

So, now the ball is in the Repubicans' court.  The Democrats have found their pride and that's worth toasting. So raise a glass with me.

Bottoms Up!

Mexican Standoff

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My fellow Americans,

As the protests and reactions to anti-Illegal Immigrant legislation in Arizona continue to swirl the lawyers are now getting ready to argue whether or not the law is constitutional.  If you stop and think about it, the fact that a law making illegal immigrants illegal may itself be illegal is kind of ironic.

The actual legislation has plenty of problems, and is most likely going to be struck down by the courts. Not only does it appear that it will encourage institutionalized racial profiling, but the provision mandating investigation of immigration status seems to violate the protection against unwarranted search and seizure guaranteed by the 4th amendment, quite probably rendering the law unconstitutional.

But let’s be honest with ourselves.  This law was never really about addressing Illegal Immigration.  There are already more than enough laws about illegal immigration on the books. This law is about whipping the flag-sucking dunderheads into a frenzy by telling them that it’s necessary to protect our sovereignty.  It’s just a shiny piece of foil dangled in front of a group of retards.  It plays on their latent fears and draws their attention while letting them raise a righteous anger and drape themselves in patriotic slogans.  More than that, it assures them that things are not their fault.  It’s because of the other guy.  In other words, it’s another ploy to make the Orthogonians feel like they are being victimized.

And it’s as old as time itself.  The ancient Hittites would constantly complain about those un-cultured Assyrians.  The Romans used the Gauls as their whipping boy.  The Soviets would scapegoat the filthy and lazy Uzbeks.  And back in the 1800's we had the Irish and the Italians.  And now we have the Mexicans.

It’s a subtle political strategy I used throughout my political life. I knew that the boogeyman of communism is fine, but it’s a conceptual threat.  It’s not real. Not tangible.  So, I also used real scapegoats, like hippies and civil rights activists.  Real threats that the Silent Majority can see, hear, and smell.  And just like hippies and civil rights activists, Mexicans are a good release for the inherent Prejudice and Fear of the Orthogonians.  Someone real on whom we can blame all our problems.  The economy stinks?  Well it’s because the Mexicans are taking all the jobs.  Healthcare is broken?  It’s because the Mexicans are flooding the emergency rooms without paying.  Too many drugs?  It’s because the Mexicans are pushing dope.  Teen pregnancy?  Those hot-blooded Mexicans are sexing up our daughters.  Traffic? All the damn Mexicans on the roads.  Global warming?  Well, Mexicans eat a lot of beans, which causes them to fart, which increased greenhouse gasses.

You get the picture.

And it works. We conservatives have always been able to solidify our base by manufacturing a common enemy, then using it as a way to scare the feeble-minded into supporting us. It’s the political analogy of the second law of thermodynamics. In physics kinetic energy increases in proportion to entropy.  In politics, power increases in proportion with fear.

Which brings us back to the Arizona law.  This law was written with the 2010 mid-term elections in mind, and was intentionally designed to fail.  The Orthogonians out there waving their flags and shouting patriotic platitudes are just sheep, bleating along in their willful ignorance as they’re herded by the GOP.  And when this law is overturned the republicans intend to convert the anger of the rubes into votes against the liberals who coddle  immigrants.

Manipulation never goes out of style.  Because there will never be a shortage of nincompoops out there.

Nixon Approves

Tradition

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My fellow Americans,

The dog days of the 2010 mid-term election are starting to really heat up.  The normal sniping and random shots across the DMZ have started to become coordinated and targeted.  Individuals are being pointed out, names are being called, accusations raised, and challenges leveled.

I love the smell of politics in the morning.

Yesterday, the NRCC (National Republican Campaign Committee) fired a shot across the DNC’s bow by claiming that they were “playing the race card from the bottom of the deck” because they (the Democrats) are working to bring out the minorities to vote in November.   The sheer balls of that statement is bewildering!  And, very gratifying to this old race-baiter.

Now, you have to understand that using race as a campaign strategy is an exceedingly delicate proposition. Back in 1966 when I was laying the foundation for my presidential run in ’68, I saw that the nation was ripe for using race as a tool to stoke the fires of Dread and Revulsion burning in the hearts of white people. Had I tried this in either ’64 or ’65 I would have been flogged like a heretic in the Inquisition. Just look at what happened to Goldwater and his cadre of Birchers and segregationists. But by 1966 race riots had been popping up in cities all over, and the radicals like Stokeley Carmichael had begun to give the equal rights movement a bad name.  The glow of the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act had vanished as white people started to feel as if the minorities were ungrateful for all that was done for them. The tide was turning and the Orthogonians just needed a spark to come alive.

 

And I was there, manipulating the deepest and most vile nightmares of Joe Sixpack and Sally Lunchpail.  The Franklins snickered at me, saying that people were sophisticated enough to realize that the unrest within the minority population was due to economic inequalities and entrenched social injustice.  They scoffed at the notion that white people would quiver in terror over the idea of integrating schools.  They mocked the idea that folks would be so gullible as to fall for such obvious and depraved tactics as preying on the myth of hulking Negro men defiling the flower of pure white innocence.

I love it when Franklins underestimate me.  My instincts were true.  The Orthogonians are sheep, easily led by exploiting their most primitive fears, and before you knew it the feeding frenzy was on.  The result was that Republicans had won the day in the ‘66 elections on the back of pure and unsoiled racial fear.

Now, as then, my fellow Republicans are turning to race, just as they have whenever things looked bleak over the past 40 years.  And once again the time is right.  Just look around: the bigotry, hatred, and prejudice among the right is close to boiling over.  Teabaggers are flaunting the same segregationist KKK slogans we used so skillfully in the 60’s – only more artfully disguised.  Propagandists are working overtime to insinuate ethnic causes for problems around the country.  And the disgust among conservatives regarding a non-white president is mouthwatering to someone clever enough to channel that Anger and Loathing for their own use.

So, the strategy of the NRCC attempting to whip up some reaction among white people by painting the Democrats as racist for working to get out the minority vote is the sign of returning to the tried and true – much the way a dog returns to his vomit.  And of course it doesn’t matter that it’s absolutely prima facie absurd.  In politics (like advertising) perception is reality.  It helps that the Orthogonians already believe these things. They just need someone to verbalize the lie to justify their hate and soothe their nascent consciences, so they can go out and act on their instinctive racism.  And trust me when I tell you that there are more of them than there are of you.

It’s nice to see that the Hebrews aren't the only ones with a sense of tradition.

Nixon is: Energized

GOP Playing on Fears: The Worst Kept Secret in Washington

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My fellow Americans,

It seems that the liberal press is once again working overtime to create a tempest in a tea pot regarding some silly memo regarding campaign strategy used by the Republican National Committee.

Evidently, this so-called memo promotes the use of fear-based tactics, character assassination, racial hysteria, and muckraking in campaigns, and urge republican candidates to portray the president and other democrats as driving the country to socialism.

Leaving aside the likely truth that this so-called memo is a fake, fabricated by the left-wing conspiracy in order to paint true and loyal Americans as dishonest (or at least unethical), the bigger question is why this is news at all?

Have all of you people been in a coma for the past 100 years?  Every important political campaign since John Adams smeared Thomas Jefferson as a slave loving fancy-lad has involved playing on the voters' fears. Whether it's me questioning my opponent's patriotism by making baseless accusations that they're a communist; George HW Bush raising the ghosts of racial horror by using a mug-shot to imply that Michael Dukakis will set free wild eyed negroes to feast on the tender flesh of the nation's pure white daughters; or George W Bush terrorizing people with the looming apocalypse of their christian civilization at the hands of bloodthirsty muslim zealots, poltics is a lowest-common-denominator business.

 

You gonna get raped

And the public are lemmings - either too drunk or too stupid to ever catch on.  Paradoxically, the bigger and more outrageously one creates the fear, the more the dopes believe it, because only then does it seem plausible.  The rubes out in the cornfields who cling to their bibles and hold guns and NASCAR sacred need this.  Fear breeds hate, and hate is a great motivating factor.  When you get people to hate something, you can use that to your advantage. The Nazis understood this, and it's something we republicans have adopted as our own. It doesn't matter who you make the threat: communists, homosexuals, hippies, minorities, illegal immigrants, students and intellectuals, muslims, the French - all you have to do is pick a group to blame for all the current problems, then associate your opponent with them. 

This so-called memo isn't news.  It's the republican way.

Nixon is: Confused About the Fuss

Slap-Fight in the GOP

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My fellow Americans,

As you could probably tell, my mood of late hasn’t been good, what with the shenanigans of that dingbat from Alaska and her family, and my ex-Chief of Staff sliding into the great beyond. It’s felt like the summer of 1974 all over again, only this time without the solace of sycophants like Henry, Tex, and the Bobs to help me out. Thank god for bourbon and anti-depressants. 

But there is a bit of light peeking through the clouds.  There is nothing that can bring me out of my doldrums quicker than a good old fashioned political slap-fight . The deceit, duplicity, degradation, and depravity that comes when politicians start calling one another’s character into question is like slamming pure, uncut bliss.

Unfortunately, it’s the republican party which is apparently undergoing a bit of an identity crisis.  Tempers are rising and egos getting bruised as the hacks, misanthropes, ward-heelers, waterheads, and dopes all start pointing fingers, making accusations, and claim the mantle of top conservative. And in doing so, they’ll eventually need to look back to how we used to do it back in the day.  Bring out the big guns.  Political campaign is nothing but controlled slander, and the one who does it the best usually wins.   

The trick is to be completely unrestrained and uninhibited about how you assassinate the character of your competitor. I know it sounds absurd, but the more unbelievable, bold, and shameless your attacks, the more the rubes will buy it. It’s an art form, and one that the republicans, sadly, seem to have forgotten.  Look at 2008.  The McCain campaign made a few minor assaults on Obama’s integrity and allegiance (mainly in the form of clumsy and uninspired speeches), but they were so feeble, it was clear they were lies. Now compare that with my first campaign in 1946, when I mercilessly slandered Jerry Voorhis by calling him a communist.  Of course he wasn’t a communist, and of course the people knew he wasn’t.  But my brave strategy of calling him one paid off, and I whipped him like a runaway slave.  Why?  Because the outrageous and contemptible lies fed the public’s desire to believe.  Truth, like compassion, has no place in politics.

The sad thing is that none of the current crop of dimwits in the republican party know what a real conservative is anyway.  Now, Barry Goldwater, there was a real conservative.  I knew Barry Goldwater.  I served my country with Barry Goldwater.  Barry Goldwater was a friend of mine. And I can say with complete confidence that Rush Limbaugh is no Barry Goldwater.

Nixon: Approves