The "subprime mortgage" fiasco is being treated as if it is some kind of exotic financial disease heretofore unknown to man. There seems to be a lot of "how could we have known?" going around. But if one looks beneath the specifics and gets to the generalities, one quickly realizes the fiasco is of a type that can be traced far back in history The specifics are different but the generalities are the same. The problem is one of speculation.
As a voting public we cannot forgive former governor Eliot Spitzer for wrecking his personal life; but we can forgive a president for wrecking his nation. Is there something wrong with this picture?
"Kill her, Kill her." That's what the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum were chanting during the trial of a western school teacher who had allowed her students to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." The judges handed down a somewhat more moderate sentence, 15 days in prison. The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, a young British woman, had offended Islam by allowing a stuffed animal to bear the name of its greatest prophet. And this, the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum found heretical.
Evil Democrats have been working overtime this year to embarass the bejesus out of Republican Presidential Candidates. And it's just not right. It's just not fair. Take this, for example. During a recent debate a person who is giving paid advice to the Clinton campaign asked a question of the Republican Candidates. It just about ruined the whole event. What right do they have to do this?
So you are clearing brush in your large back yard and you get strung by a bee. This pisses you off. You live next to a national park and there is a natural hive ten feet tall, twenty feet wide, and five feed deep not far from the edge of your property There must be a billion bees in there. . In your pain and anger, you decide to to act.
The following is a liturgical mass for the neocon. It celebrates the neocon God. It orients the neocon to his goal. It binds together the neocon practitioners into one practicing body.
The Chicago School Mass
In memory of all the guys who taught us how to get power, manipulate fear and greed, and make tons of money.
When the clouds of dust arose on the horizon announcing the approach of Genghis Khan's armies, it was too late. Hoards of keshiks would descend on the city and demand fealty or death. One submitted or the city was levelled. Either way, the city fell, the hoards took what they wanted, and they rode on. Khan's armies struck quickly and dealt severely with opponents. "I am the wrath of God," claimed Khan. His sense of victimhood had turned to one of entitlement.
Stephen Schwartz writes at the Weekly Standard about a conference on the partition of Iraq arranged by Senator Joe Biden. His first complaint is that there was but a single neocon there. And that was himself. This might be a fair complaint had the Iraq war not been sold to the American public by this same group using a pack of lies. If a stranger drives into town on a buldozer and demolishes your house and for years fails to explain why, it is simply is not reasonable to rely totally on his own good graces to restore it to working order.
Sniffing out a Better Presidential Candidate
What were the founders of this country thinking, for God's sakes? It's as if they were sooooo obsessed with separation of powers, freedom of religion, and the distinction between republics, monarchies, and democracies that they forgot all the important issues. The requirements of the president, for instance are a laugh. He has to be born in this nation. And he has to be thirty five or older. Like that matters.
The circus has started. The problem is, however, that it threatens us with less bread. The circus this election cycle starts with Obama in the central ring where he is being taunted for being born into the wrong family. And by virtue of his poor choice of parents, Obama himself is being turned into one of those "t" persons.
George F. Will has gone out of his way this week to teach us that truth is not a conservative value. To find out how he did this, we need to start the story before the 1980 Presidential election.
Two deceits helped vault Reagan to power in 1980. Maybe more. The one that is well known is the agreement forged between Iranian revolutionaries and a contingency including HW not to release American hostages before the election in return for access to a large pile of arms purchases. Those purchases became the matter of the Iran-Contra hearings which threatened the Reagan Presidency and the position of Robert Gates, currently the nominee for Secretary of Defense. Both of these men, as witnesses, were plagued with remarkably faulty memories. But it is notoriously difficult to prosecute a person for failed memories. Read about it in Kevin Phillips American Dynasty or Google Iran Contra.
Santa Clarita CA. Twelve year old Quentin Arbuckle was injured at a local Chuck E. Cheeses today while playing a modified game of Whack-a-Mole. The game had gotten pretty intense and young Arbuckle found himself pounding away at the targets with great enthusiasm. That enthusiasm springs from his own dislike of the "mole" - in this particular case, little statuettes of George W. Bush. "I really don't like that guy, " Arbuckle said. "I suppose it doesn't help much that my older brother lost his left earlobe in Iraq." But that's another story. The question of how the machine got modified is under investigation, but there is an unsubstantiated rumor that Republican party canvasers were massed around it soon after election night.
Bush has provided one justification after another for invading Iraq. Each has proven false. The current justification, though only barely whispered, is "oil." It is what pretty much every person in every other nation in the world assumed as the purpose of the invasion from the start.
Suppose it had worked out, would it have been a good deal? Here we argue that the same amount invested in primary power generation projects would have made the oil in Iraq essentially irrellevant as a primary energy source. Instead, oil remains a strategic Achilles heel for America. If energy is as important as Bush's commitment to it suggests, it is time to redeploy resources in a major way.
Accurate language is not just the sign of clear thinking, it is instrumental to clear thinking. We need to create language that properly reflects important distinctions and generalizations, and supports the mental activity of doing this. The Republicans who lost in this years elections exploited and distorted language practices codified by Gingrich and managed to win doing it. This year's election results might properly be interpreted to mean an end to the hegemony of Gingrich's language distortion. To bury it, we need to create evocative language to describe our own ideas. Here, we argue for a descriptive word for the Republicans who brought us Bushworld.
Mike Stark has dramatized what we have known to be happening for some time: the effort to quash political dissent by Republican party office holders who resort to threats of violence or arrest. It may amount to arresting people who wear the wrong shirt in the wrong place. Cindy Sheehan at the Capitol or the Chicago veteran with the "Veterans for Peace" Tee come immediately to mind. Such abuses tempt us to resort to colorful phrases to describe the behavior.
Juan Cole www.juancole.com/ notes that evangelicals are losing patience with the Bush Administration. It seems Bush has bungled the second-coming. Maybe God has stopped telling him what to do. Maybe Bush incurred God's wrath for massaging the neck of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in public. Whatever the reason, evangelicals' support of Republicans is down to 58%.
