Tilting At Straw Men
03 November 2006 8:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Tilting At Straw Men
guest post by Ed Encho
So now John Kerry has officially apologized for his botched joke about the lack of the presence of any sort of matter within the sucking black hole that exists between George W. Bush’s ears that was twisted by the right to somehow become an 'attack' on the intelligence of the poor troops currently trapped in the middle of a bloody, escalating civil war in Iraq. How very typical that when it comes to confrontation that the DLC demands sucking up and slinking off into the corner out of sight and mind rather than any sort of vigorous counterattack against a ruthless dug in enemy that hates us for our freedoms and way of life that they have condemned since Richard M. Nixon was run out of the American tax payer's house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue like the diseased, rabid cur that he truly was.
This certainly does not bode well before an election that is so very critical but hardly surprising given the consultants advised Kerry to run the white flag up the pole before the votes had even been properly counted in Ohio back in 2004 when Rove and his thugs brutally mugged democracy which has since been proven in reports by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and John Conyers.
The Republican operatives and their media were laying in wait for exactly this sort of gaffe and Rove's little demons made certain that his comments were morphed into slandering the troops rather than the moron who sent them into the bloody *”!* cluster in the first place in order to sate both his Oedipus complex as well as the delusional longings of crazed old men to somehow recreate the Vietnam War only with them now calling the shots and this time determined rig the game in order to crush all dissent beneath their jack booted heels and screw the Constitution, thugs like David Addington and his legal army would ensure that that goddamned piece of paper wouldn't get it the way of their bloodlust.
And in my opinion even if Kerry were indeed speaking about the students rather than Junior Bush he would have been correct in telling them with a brutal honesty unseen in this lemming infested country that becoming educated enough to hold anything that passes for a good job in the economic wasteland of the shrinking middle class of America is a damned good way to stay out of the massive lie of a war that Bush and his lunatic neocon warmongers sold to the public on the basis of a pack of lies and apocalyptic conjecture about smoking guns and mushroom clouds.
After all, how many rich Republican children are currently taking fire in the streets of Baghdad and how many high-income percentile families are now facing the prospects of dealing with twenty something year old paraplegics and those with permanent brain injuries that have rendered them unable to function? And the flag waving demagogue in the White House and his lackeys in the Republican congress are slashing VA benefits to maintain their Christian socialism, corporate welfare programs and tax cuts for the rich.
In America today lies and spin are considered my many to be far more virtuous than the truth which will quickly get one labeled as a pessimist, a defeatist and even a traitor with an exclamation point on the latter during this most malodorous and rank of campaign seasons where a sitting president has deemed that it is somehow acceptable to accuse the majority of Americans who exist outside the toxic atmosphere of the bubble that he and his miscreant base inhabit of wanting to see the terrorists kill the innocent for voicing opposition to a dirty, illegal war and a creeping totalitarian police state.
This latest astounding lack of courage exhibited by Vichy DLC hacks who have proven nothing other than that they are still fully capable of screwing this all up and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is yet another slap in the face of a neglected party base already sick of the same old spinelessness and acquiescence that have facilitated the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil’s war on America rather than allow any voices to speak out and steal the limelight from Hillary or interfere with the ambitions of that sleazy little pimp Rahm Emanuel. It can’t help boost turnout when a trademark DLC whimpering surrender in the face of yet another Republican swift boating does nothing but demoralize the base days before an election. This is a time in our history when a massive presence at the polls is absolutely critical in order to prevent the electronic rigging that has become standard GOP operating procedure since black box voting was implemented much to the delight of Corporate America.
What is so ridiculous about this whole sordid episode is that a huge turnout is critical because if the bastards are going to steal it again it at least needs to be made so obvious that even the blind fools in the MSM will take notice. But it sure doesn’t help when Kerry is forced by DLC cash whores to humiliate himself and the party by apologizing and only serves to reinforce the image of weakness that the GOP has worked so hard to tar the Democrats as with. Just where does it say that a successful strategy in war is to give your enemy the knife with which he is going to cut your throat? If Neville Chamberlain were reincarnated as an American politician he would be surely appointed head of the DLC.
The entire desperate attack Kerry onslaught brought on by the Republican slime machine this week is vintage Texas lowball politics at it’s worst and it brings to mind the following anecdote from the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson regarding the ruthless tactics of LBJ on his way up that seem to have inspired the likes of Rove and the rest of the Texas mafia who currently occupy the White House:
Back in 1948, during his first race for the US Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and told him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.
His campaign manager was shocked. “We can't say that, Lyndon,” he supposedly said. “You know that it isn't true.”
“Of course it's not!” Johnson barked. “But let's make the bastard deny it!”
You can bet a phony Crawford, TX dude ranch that in addition to gleaning tips from Adolph Hitler that Rove also studied LBJ as he sought to compile tips for his divisive and dishonest political strategies and the next best thing to making the bastard deny it is to make him apologize for something that he never said (but was put out in a twisted context) in the first place.
The whole thing was beautifully set up with the networks alerted as to when Bush would go on the attack against Kerry and the hate radio pundits and babbling asses at FOX were ready to pounce like sharks after fresh chum. The swift boating of Kerry who had already been reduced to a caricature as an Eastern elitist foofy haired dufus after his failed 2004 presidential run began immediately and the guns were blazing. The GOP even trotted out the shameless opportunist John McCain who has somehow been canonized as some sort of American hero for his time spent in the Hanoi Hilton where he was brutally tortured by the VC but somehow came to learn to kiss the whip in order to endorse the savage torture policies of the Bush junta. That McCain was one of the crooked participants in the Keating Five scandal never merits any mention as to the true nature of his ‘character’ to viciously slander fellow Vietnam vet Kerry over his comments which are being played over and over and over just like the re-mastered version of the 'Dean Scream' that took down the last man who dared to attack the corrupt spoils system.
Then there is the Vietnam inference, very subtle but always there. McCain is the man who stayed and endured years of hell while Kerry came back and threw his medals over the fence while denouncing the war like the hippies and Jane Fonda. This is always lurking in the American subconscious, like a bouncing betty just waiting to be sprung by unscrupulous political operatives anxious to rip off the scab one more time and to pour on the salt for political advantage. That it is the Republican chickenhawks who are lining up with salt shakers is an irony that is lost on this nation of apathetic dumb-asses who are more interested in the really important things like the latest episode of CSI USA, Lost, NFL football, American Idol or in the whether it is Suri Cruise or Baby Brangelina who most closely resembles a modern day Christ child.
The Kerry comments generated an all hands on deck dittohead alert to bail out a GOP pirate ship that has been sinking in a sea of shit with the prospect of the cult leaders having to soon walk the plank that was becoming more of a possiblity by the minute. It also created a rare opportunity for the Republicans to go on the offensive which they are much better at, witness the mugging of the blogger by brownshirts employed by George Felix Allen's campaign. They suck at defense like all bullies do but the Democrats have yet to figure that very simple fact out and exploit the glass jaws of the gutless wonders of the GOP.
The right wing echo chamber was humming for days and until the wonderful revelation that yet another one of the bigtime ‘family values’ guys, Pastor Ted Haggard a rising star in the reactionary theocratic movement was outed as just another member of the Republican sodomite Cabal. Haggard who bragged of his influence with George W. Bush himself had a tendency to wander from his mammoth 14,000 member Colorado Springs megachurch just down the road from Dobson’s evil empire to the big city of Denver on a pilgrimage for meth and cock. The empire is still trying to find a way to spin this disaster and we will see how the MSM servants of the oligarchy react. This should be big time news in a nation weaned on the twisted exploits of very local news pervert story all the way on up to Michael Jackson. The Haggard revelations could be the proverbial turd in the punchbowl for Rove’s Wednesday victory parties.
As for Republicans,just who in the hell ever gave those people the authority to speak for American morality to begin with and just when did lockstep centrally controlled, think tank distilled, reich wing online activism and the accompanying economic terrorism of organized targeted boycotts for the sake of advancing a decidedly anti-American agenda come to pass for patriotism? And exactly how did degenerate shitheads like Pastor Ted Haggard come to be spokesmen for family values?
Sweet Jesus! The majority of these insipid and stupid assholes have NEVER even worn a uniform in service to your country and yet think that they have some sort of authority in sending others off to die for your freedom to be ignorant? And as far as Jesus Christ goes their constant invocation of him as some sort of sick endorsement figure for decidedly un-Christlike, Social Darwinist fiendish Reaganite politics you have to wonder just how many ever actually bothered to read the Bible? They wouldn't understand the true meaning of the gospels of Christ if someone beat then over their pointy dense heads with the goddamned thing.
Well just screw apologies!
Where is the apology from the Republican one party government for the families of those maimed or killed in their Mesopotamian misadventure? I guess that it's impossible to apologize for something that they fail to even acknowledge. The GOP has no shame but that is hardly a secret and more people are catching on by the day that they've been had. This is just another Republican tempest in a teapot while our boys keep coming home in body bags due to the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil's gross corruption, ineptitude and mismanagement of the war.
And see just how far that the mockingbirds in the media continue to run with this slanderous Kerry crap. It's time to earn their pay from the elitist Chivas sipping, caviar eating, Lexus driving, Wall Street Journal reading crony capitalists who control the six (or is it five?) corporations with interlocking directorates that are the gatekeepers for truth in this overly entertained and under informed society.
And it was again America’s real moral beacon Keith Olberman who was the one with the stones to engage in the debunking the ludicrous attacks on Kerry, nobody has taken their game to the next level like the MSNBC Countdown host in these darkest of days and he should serve as an inspiration to all for his recent diatribes against the Bush administration’s reich wing thugs. To think at one time there was actually a free press and investigative journalism in this country is nearly incomprehensible now but I am old enough to remember those days.
Incidentally, our press has recently been 'honored' by Reporters Without Borders as the 53rd freest in the world (we are tied with Croatia, Botswana and Tonga) although still comfortably ahead of our good friends the Bush Family loving Saudis and the holders of billions of dollars in national debt that is China which incidentally the top importer of much of the cheap shit that Americans buy on credit by the cartload at their neighborhood Walmarts as the ever patient sleeping giant laughs at our short-sighted ignorance.
When will this country wake up? Let us all hope for the sake of freedom and liberty that the answer comes before Tuesday.
