Ambrose Bierce once said, "If you leave your mind sufficiently open, sooner or later, somebody will come along and through some garbage in it."
If your not familiar with local online suburban newspapers, you should check them out. There's an abundance of these Internet-based rags around the Country. Many are owned by large National Parent organizations like the Journal Register Company. These community "newspapers" mix local high school sports news with a late breaking story about the township's upcoming run-off race for dog catcher. The Editorial page, however, usually carries a mix of Op-Eds covering local and National issues. The contributing writers are generally a blend of local staff and News Service commentators supplied through the parent company. I'd estimate that the vast majority of both local and National Op-Ed contributors are spewing Wingnut garbage by the ton. Most of the local operators have tiny viewerships, and like their big brothers, many have been forced to shut down. But I believe this niche news market could be successfully reinvented. Many are shedding a prior debt service inherited from their paper-based past (Journal Register itself recently emerged from Chapter 11). IMO, Progressives have unnecessarily ceded this market to the Right,.
But this Diary is really about the fun I've been having since last Summer interjecting my own political critiques on the ramblings of just one of those local Suburban Op-Ed writers. Aside from writing regular and unintentionally funny commentaries (they'd be funnier if "The Stupids" didn't believe him), Stan is also the local paper's Editor-in-Chief... and as odds would have it, the local Wingnut-in-Chief.
As debates go, it not exactly Lincoln-Douglas III. While I don't personally find garden variety Wingnuts to be as cute and huggable as their Guinea Pig ancestors, Stan seems like a pleasant enough fellow. I just wouldn't recommend him as a family pet oras a source of all knowledge... or even a morsel of truth.
He's one of those well-meaning but misguided souls we feel compelled to win over with sound research and airtight logic - as opposed to the screaming, gun-toting, swastika-drawing variety who we are more commonly fleeing from these days.
I knew very little about on-line local papers until last Summer's campaign. I didn't even know these papers existed in any great numbers until a fellow Obama volunteer brought up the subject and sent me a link to one of the Right-slanted rags published near my home. My first exposure to one of Stan's columns revealed a wealth of egregious falsehoods in almost every sentence. Stan's tirade against then Candidate Obama was comprised of a series of poorly researched arguments with sources running the gamut from none to mass-emailed slag originating under the over-heated tin foil helmets of people just making up shit. But Stan clings to misinformation like ticks cling to a stray dog. That's the beauty of being a Republican Wingnut. Like a Terminator, it feels no remorse. It's the perfect shilling machine. Yet, Stan is much more the charmer than say... Chuck Grassley. Armed with no more than a Remington Rand, he can deliver his drivel with the avuncular panache of that grizzled old-timer at the corner pub - In Stan's case, it's a preset mind mimicking the onset of social and political dementia. Basically, Stan's columnic structure is composed of random factoidal falsehoods leading to a fallacious and often irrelevant (but always folksy) summation. Each interior argument is poorly formed and ill-fitting against the next. In other words, his conclusion is constructed like a string of modest, nugget-like turds piled up to resemble one impressive, giant crap.
How could I tread carefully upon a stirred nest of shit sausage links, each "stifled in its own report,
and smell of calumny" (thank you Kossack VC2 and W. Shakespeare).
My immediate instinct was to try something new.
Without any plan, I began to separate each one of Stan's outlandish statements and insert my own quippy response between them as if we were having a live debate - of course, with me always getting the last word.
There's no shouting, no loaded guns, no crude name-calling - and I always try to build in a small compliment or kindness or smile somewhere in the middle of abject political derision.
From time to time, I check the local paper's site to see if it's still in business and still churning out the misinformation of a Fox News wannabe. I immediately look for Stan's byline, sincerely hoping he has survived the latest round of budget cuts.
As a common reality encroaches on us all, I half expect some life-changing epiphany in the night to divert his fingers to the forces of good - his DNA string permanently altered - a mythical dusty gray hat with the word "PRESS" proudly tucked into the rim band.
But Stan will never change, and In a perverse way, I't's comforting to know that his thought process has remained free of the confinements of logic, even as we're being devoured in the jaws of gripping new social realities.
Stan's intellectual stunting and intractability is my security blanket. I know he won't change, but he also won't shoot me. These days, that's good enough for me.
So anyway, I thought you might like to eavesdrop on our latest "debate." Some of Stan's comments have been edited for brevity by yours truly, but I have strived to maintain the structural integrity of his arguments... for what little they 're worth.
I always enjoy my conversations with Stan, even though he's a non-responsive, unwilling and unwitting participant. It’s just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates where I play Lincoln to his Douglas - except entirely different.
Stan awkwardly titled this Monday's Op-Ed:
"Sounding Alarm for Republican Party".
Stan: What happened?
When did being a Republican become synonymous with being a pariah?
Wally: Well Stan, that started, first insidiously, around January 20, 2001. The death of the Republican Party as a National entity became apparent after GW Bush attacked the wrong Country, threw $2 Trillion down a hole in Baghdad, gave a 1.2 Trillion tax break to the rich, let an American City drown and oversaw the loss of untold trillions from our retirement accounts. (and then the really bad stuff happened). IMO, some of the above decisions may have bruised a few egos here and there - and everywhere.
Stan: Personally, I’m proud to be a card-carrying member of the party, but I’m not so sure about some of my alleged brethren.
Wally: Now Stan, don’t go questioning your Republican brethren. Just sit back and bask in that monolithic, thought-free zone in which Republicans glow.
Anyway, eating one’s own is the job of us Democrats.
Stan: I actually stopped on “Real Time With Bill Maher” last week when I was surfing through the channels to find something to watch because I do like to listen to what the other side of the aisle has to say… Anyway, Ross Douthat, a self-proclaimed conservative who used to be a writer at the Atlantic, was on the show. He actually apologized for being a Republican. This is a guy who graduated from Harvard and then wrote a book about the elite ruling class, and then another, “The Grand New Party” outlining just where the Republican Party should be heading.
Wally: I’m 100% with you on this point, Stan. How dare that smarty-pants Douthat guy write a book that offers a clear and intelligent direction for the Republican Party – and just when things were going so well for us Democrats?
How could he Dou-that! (sorry – couldn’t resist the pun).
Personally, I’ve never recovered from being turned down for admission to Harvard.
Well, truth be known, I never bothered to apply, but it still felt like a rejection to me. They’re all just a bunch of effete, impudent snobbish book writers up there… and they cuss out “yo mamma” and get arrested for entering their own houses (how stupid is that?) and drink Jamaican beer and… and write more books and, and... and think all the time!
Stan: He (Douthat) was hired to be the lone conservative columnist at the New York Times, and yet, there he was apologizing, but ultimately saying that he would ‘for the purposes of the show’ be a Republican.
Wally: Did the Times' other smart Conservative writer, David Brooks, drown - awash in a self-made sea of verbal beatitude (just like this sentence)? Did he accidentally say something civil about Obama, and like all those before him, get excommunicated by Rush?
Stan: Being a Republican is not a bad thing, we’ve just had a lot of bad Republicans mucking up the works lately.
Wally: By bad Republicans I suppose you mean smart Republicans. Republicans that cringe when other Republicans talk about Death Panels and espouse Birther theories and hang tea bags over their ears and channel the ghost of Joe McCarthy. There you go sounding like an apologetic Democrat, again. Careful Stan – if they can revoke Brooks’ license, they can make yours disappear, too.
Stan: We’re on the brink of having one of the largest governments in the history of this country, and that absolutely goes against the grain of all things Republican.
Wally: Hey – I miss Herbert Hoover, too. Did you know Hoover spoke fluent Mandarin? I wonder how much crazier Orly Taitz and the Birthers would become if they suspected Obama could speak Mandarin? For that matter, I wonder how crazy Orly's followers would get if they knew she spoke Russian?
We all get misty-eyed recalling Reagan's Death Valley Days plan for reducing government. You know, Put a fox in charge of every hen house and then leave it in George HW's lap to figure out how to squeeze eggs out of a fox.
I call it "Trickle Down Eggonomics."
Of course, George W oversaw the largest growth in the Federal government in U.S. history – but who’s counting? Not you Republicans.
On a related note, If I ever actually form my Do-Wop Revival Band, I’m calling it “Orly Taitz and the Birthers.”
Stan: The infighting has to stop. We’re never going to get anywhere if we can’t get out of our own way.
Wally: I agree whole-heartedly, Stan. Being something of an amateur Political Consultant. let me throw a free idea your way…
Try arranging the remaining Republicans into a single file. That shouldn’t be too difficult since there aren’t too many of you left standing. Then march true North and don’t stop until you cross the U.S./ Canadian border. It gets a little chilly up there, so bring a coat. But rest assured, should any of you get sick or have an accident, every one of you will automatically qualify for inexpensive and top quality Canadian Healthcare.
(and take those “Moose Crossing” signs seriously)
Stan: I like the idea of the county cutting jobs. I don’t think they’re cutting them all in the right places, but it is a great place to start… Now imagine if every county across the country did the same thing.
I’d be willing to bet the federal government would find itself in much better fiscal shape, too.
Wally: Again, a super idea Stan. A real win-win for Republicans if you can pull this one off. You’d have less spending as critical government services come to a stand-still AND you can turn around and blame Obama for the 20% unemployment rate that would result from those cuts.
Stan:... we would have smaller government at all levels as a side benefit. That’s a Republican idea I can live with.
Wally: If you don’t mind living without roads, bridges, schools, electricity, clean water, airports, police forces, trash pickup, etc. But on the bright side, you’d finally get rid of the biggest Socialist program of them all - Medicare. We didn’t have those things 6,000 years ago. Life was so simple back then. Wingnuts traveled to work by dinosaur and ate apples and wore fig leaves. I still don’t understand what fig leaves were doing on apple trees, but glory gee to Beesus for true miracles!
Stan: I’ve taken some grief over calling President Obama’s health care plan Socialism.
Wally: No doubt grief from Republicans who insist the President is Adolf Hitler and not just a run-of-the-mill Norman Thomas Socialist. They've worked too long and hard trying to figure out how to draw swastikas in the correct direction.
Stan:This Republic is based on Capitalism.
Wally: Hey. Capitalism has certainly made us all filthy rich.
But you know what I wish? I wish I had bought stock in Magic Marker. Who knew they’d sell billions of black pens to Tea-baggers just so the TBs could scribble Hitler mustaches on the President’s photograph?
But seriously Stan, here’s a quick pop quiz question for a huge Constitution supporter like yourself:
(music up & under)
Where in the Constitution can you find the word “Capitalism?”
(sfx: buzzer)
I’m sorry – you’re time is up.
The correct answer is… NOWHERE.
Stan: If the auto manufacturers can’t make it on their own the government absolutely should not bail them out.
Wally: Stan. Stan. Stan. Killing America’s core industries may not be the best way to preserve that cerement of unbridled Capitalism in which you would vest a shroud befitting the most naked of ambitions, if you get my drift - because you've got me so upset I don't know what the hell I'm saying, anymore. If you Republicans are still pining away for Hoover, adding five million more Americans to the unemployment lines will help us equal the 24.9% unemployment rate of 1933. Five million is the number of people who work in, or depend on, the Auto industry for their livelihoods. Once Republicans extinguish American industry, we can all become virtual stock brokers and buy and sell virtual companies - sort of like trading in fantasy football players. No income but no risk, either.
Stan: John Hofmeister (the President of Shell Oil. claimed) that if they weren’t allowed to drill that the price of gasoline would continue to rise and that $5 a gallon would look miniscule in comparison (to future prices).
Wally: This is an easy one. Build larger pumps so the numbers appear to be smaller. But seriously Stan, The Oil Industry hasn't even started drilling on over 90 percent of the oil and natural gas-rich public land and water rights that they’ve already leased but haven’t even bothering to tap yet - nor have they paid the American people one cent for those rights.
THINK Stan - Maybe the Industry just likes having a Monopoly handed to them for free - and it's our public land! They've been guaranteed exclusive drilling rights on practically every open parcel of workable government land this side of the Sun... for all eternity. The Oil Industry can make money whether they drill, or don't drill, because nobody else has access and they already own what's out of the ground. So it's more in their interest to simply maintain control of the leases then it is to drill. The oil companies don't have to invest capital and they can jack up the price of oil through hoarding, deliberate lack of exploration and by maintaining the current scarcity of processing facilities for the existing supply. Thanks to our government's land giveaway, it's the most perfect Monopoly ever known to mankind. And the oil companies still want more. In that light, the phrase "Drill Baby Drill" takes on a whole new meaning.
The Petroleum Institute claims that if we simply tap all of our natural resources (land and sea), we’d have enough oil and natural gas to heat every American household for 60 years. Well nobody's stopping them! As I said, they already have exclusive drilling rights to most of the known oil fields. Of course, that "60 year" claim has already been debunked. If they bothered to drill on every one of those land and sea lease sites, there wouldn't be enough oil under ground and under water to sustain us that long, based on estimated domestic supplies and considering our current projected growth and usage rate. But even if the claim was accurate, the obvious question is, “after 60 years, then what?”
Finally, thanks to Republican Global Warming deniers like Palin, Inhofe, Barton and others, the U.S. is making only the most feeble efforts to fund the research required to convert our economy to clean new energy sources.
Stan: Government take over of every company in America? (threatening the) take over of all the gas companies in the country.
Didn’t Chavez do the same thing down in Venezuela?
I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, but I do think it’s past time to sound the Republican alarm.
Wally: Chavez is coming up here to take over our companies? Now I’m scared!
Wait – which Chavez? The boxer, the grape guy or the pudgy dictator? I say build enormous fences, around everything! Start with Joan Rivers.
Stan: Our federal government should basically be taking care of roads and bridges and protecting our shores. That’s the way this great experiment started and it worked pretty darn well for a very long time.
What happened?
Wally: Sorry Stan, but I don’t have a simple answer for you on this one, but here are the Cliff Notes:
We ran out of money for roads and bridges because we had to repair Iraq’s roads and bridges. You know – the same ones we paid to have destroyed.
Our shores are finally free of that menacing British fleet, but the medical waste floating in from New York City has put a damper on my sun bathing experience along the Jersey shore this summer.
As for what happened to the “great experiment,” I believe it just evolved, as the founders meant it to do. That’s how we got the Second Amendment. You know, the one Amendment that every would-be American assassin has memorized. Amendments are evolving after-thoughts to the Constitution and were never God-given Constitutional Rights. And speaking of Him, like the word “Capitalism,” the word "God" never appears in the Constitution, either.
The word “Lord” appears within a solitary date in the Signatory section, reading: "Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." Nothing Godly or Christian there - that’s just the way dates were written in those days.
That practice also evolved to modern form… yet the Union survives.
But returning to your closing question (“What happened”), I realize that over 50% of the current and ever-dwindling roll of Republicans will never believe in Evolution, but Evolution is the best answer I can give you. As society changes, sometimes we have to let go of some of our inherited habits – like slavery for instance. Most of us up here in the Blue States believe slavery was a bad idea from the get go. Of course, I realize that belief may not be one shared by the new Republican base.
You and I are old enough to remember when, in America, the word “Monopoly” was as scary as the word “Socialism.” Private corporate Monopolies still scare me - especially when it comes to maintaining minimal Healthcare for my family, with its ever-shrinking services ever-rising costs.
So welcome to 21st Century America, Stan.
No more slavery, no more witch burnings (except in Wasilla, Alaska) and a President who doesn’t resemble Herbert Hoover. Maybe it’s time to relax, put away those loaded guns and despicable signs and accept the decision of the majority. Back in the days of the Wild West, even horse thieves and bank robbers had the sense to check their guns at the bar room door.
That’s one age-old practice within the Great Experiment we can ill afford to change.