squidbag

Syria, Blowback & Orange Moron

Our Resident Chump is profoundly stupid. I say this not to insult him, but simply to point out simple facts. Our government is being run by a child, and not even a very smart or precocious one; we have traded purple for orange and elected Veruca Salt. As much as I hate the President - and I do, going back to the 1980s - I hate even more what he represents in terms of my fellow citizens, this blind and ridiculous anti-intellectual bullying turn for the worse, the need to wade into the shit and live there, and the continuous participation in our own distractions as we needle and dissect the reactions of a chimp wearing a rug. (Yes, I made 600 things with his quotes in them; what of it?) Mostly, the things he does are designed to get our attention, to pull focus. When they're designed. Sometimes, though, sometimes they're just reactions, like reflexive moves on his part that maybe he doesn't even realize he's done until he's already done them. The thought is the action.

Case in point: Syria. You could make the argument that we've not had really strong foreign policy now from the executive branch since the end of the Cold War, but we've all had long enough to familiarize ourselves with blowback that I thought we all understood it. It's now clear to me that this is not the case. Please go away and read Chalmers Johnson's excellent book, Blowback, and then come back and finish reading this.

I know, right?

So, we're going to get involved in Syria, begin by proffering non-military aid, then get involved militarily against the Syrian government, then kill a bunch of citizens in "surgical strikes" (just what we do) and then, after ramping up our on the ground efforts and seemingly formulating a military plan for going forward and perhaps providing a little bit of a bulwark against the Turks, completely bail out while government forces still hold most of the country and while humanitarian crises are ongoing. And why?Because "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Oh, well, that's all right, then. But wait, Orange Moron, didn't you also just get caught bitching and complaining about European countries decrying our pullout and say that it's their turn to fight ISIS? I thought they were defeated? Maybe they're just Trumpfeated, where you lie about beating someone. Much more expedient than actually beating them. (For the sake of the Resident, "expedient" means "quicker." Okay, "faster." ) Also, didn't we, like a week ago, say that this was a terrible idea, this pullout? And that it would lead to the "slaughter" of many of our allies? I mean, granted, we drone bomb civilians, but doing the numbers, that might be better than a "slaughter." Does anyone remember 1980s Afghanistan, where we trained guys, got their hopes up and then left, and it took them half a generation to raze the World Trade Center to the ground? You know, on 7-11? The Resident knows where he was on 7-11, I can tell you that much. More than anything, I think it's good that we're pulling 2000+ soldiers out of a land in crisis, but leaving more than 5000 at our border with Mexico. That seems important, especially in this time after midterms when the Caravan has ceased to exist and Sessions' prohibitions being contested and so on.

Or we're wagging the fucking dog again. The government shutdown, the new developments in the various investigations and every goddamn rat that bails from this dysfunctional ship of fools, we need to be looking the other way, and a nice fat foreign policy fuckup'll do it every time.

Trumper Villains

So, starting in 2017, I made a bunch of these. I calls them Trumper Villains.

For reasons what I should think would be obvious to people possessed of the standard five and change senses, the idea struck me (and not just me, let's be honest - other folk did variations on this, too, including one fellow who stuck entirely to the Red Skull) to put the words of Resident Chump in the mouths of comic book supervillains, who are, honestly, his inspirations and spirit animals.

I did like, 600+ of these. This one works particularly well, a little known novelty villain known as The Wall, of course, talking about the wall, of course. Perhaps not all of these are as spot on as is this one, but I did dig deep, using Tangerine Scream's tweets, books, quotes from media and his bleak-ass history, such as it is. It's appalling, and I hoped that putting his words into the mouths of super villains would not only give me a creative outlet that I enjoyed (which worked) but also throw his mouthiness into sharp relief, further highlighting the absurdity of thing he said (this worked less well). I underestimated the times in which we were living, and there was just too much bullshit being thrown about and I didn't have a big enough fan. Eventually, my efforts petered out, much like hope and optimism in this country before the giant MAGA Steamroller of Hateful Bile and Ignorance.

But I did this 600+ times first. On the left (if you're on a computer, I don't know how this will work for phones and tablets) there's a photo album down there with the same name as this entry. Go check it out and laugh or cry six hundred or so times in a row. Become exhausted and bemusedly sad. This is being an American now.

Three Years

It's been a little over three years since I really wrote stuff on here on a regular basis. I got busy, tired, unmotivated - pick one. Mostly, I blame you. The audience. The reader. The theoretical mass of broad, open faces focused on the the free "content" that I would occasionally fling across this page, like 10,000 drunken Jackson Pollack-inspired monkeys.

Why do I blame the collective you, other than it's simply easier than taking personal responsibility? Here's why. When I would spend days crafting a blog entry with a solid, escalating, logical argument full of insight about something, I would get a couple of reads and likes, and the attention would die down quickly, like an X-rated metaphor. When I would rant silly, like a bolt of driven rage pushing across pixels and filled with invective, my readers would reward me like a banana dispenser in a chimp piloted spacecraft.

Pavlov. You rewarded me for paying less attention and half-assedly throwing my shit at a wall until it stuck interestingly, and discouraged me from craft. To the point that I ceased to craft at all. Your fault.

Not really, though. In the meantime, we've seen the ascension of Twitter, which is a much more efficient way of ranting - so much so that our Least Executive, Resident Chump, uses this as his secondary form of communication, just after his primary form, assaulting people. I can't tell you how disappointed I am - I see the Chump election as my fault, in a way: I was vigilant during the President Monkeyface administration, and we got the Obama years. I take a break from blogging for a scant trio of annums and people from Appalachia team up with the Mercers and elect a reality show dickbag to the fucking White House.

This is why we can't have nice things, America.

So, I'm back. I have probably stuff to talk about. My kids are older, I'm trying to change some stuff, and the new job I posted about is now three years old. America is in the midst of a great Crappening, lots of comic book-related stuff is part of our country's mainstream conversations, and people are still doing that religion thing, so I should have some stuff to address, yeah?

Poll Position

A week ago today, I worked the polls for Rutherford County's Republican primary. Because I never had. I've been working in politics (kind of, more or less) for about 15 years now, and I got my degree in Poli-Sci; seemed like part of the package to go on in and work the polling place.

I've lurked around them on election days before - doing GOTV stuff (including once nearly assaulting a person) and getting the numbers for reporting. The first time I ever did that part, I was with Mike Basford and one of the machines broke down and we had to wait for a dot matrix printout for an additional hour. Nerve. Wracking. Nothing about these interesting election experiences prepared me for the mind-melting monotony that is a primary one month after city elections that mostly no one cares about.

I was required to be there at 6 in the morning (which is early for a loyalty oath), because I had two responsibilities, "machine operator" and "computer / printer hook-up." This second one was referred to by the registrars as "IT guy," which I found terrifying because I am not one of those. I arrived and set up tables and then took the next 30 minutes or so setting up three laptops, mice and printers and networking them to the dedicated hub that I brought with me. Once everything was active, I helped set up the actual voting booths, which took longer than it should have. The two other machine operators were well past retirement age, and this may have contributed to the delay. By 7:05 we were ready to go, with the one hitch that we hadn't actually ENABLED THE MACHINES TO START VOTE COUNTING when the first guy tried to vote. I got that fixed in about 30 seconds and we were off to the races.

'The races' were thirteen hours with 122 voters participating. I did get a lunch, read two books, and there was one printer failure (toner cartridge which required an "unvote" of one person and took 15 minutes to fix) but otherwise, this was easily the most boring thing ever. And I had jury duty the previous week. I did help a bunch of people, and had to explain more than once what the advantage was of Democrats voting in a GOP primary. The high point of my day was when an olive-skinned man named Khaled Mohammed came to vote and I, observing his name, said, "Khaled Mohammed; that must be tough to deal with here." He appreciated my empathy and told me his story, stating that I had helped reaffirm his faith in the electoral process.  Good times.

I'm glad that I did it, I'll do it again - I'm glad I'm not doing it again today.

Jury Redux

The Estes Kefauver federal building in downtown Nashville was probably a pretty swank edifice in the 1990s. The interiors are all vintage from that period – lots of chromes and heavy wood paneling in light colors displayed in anonymous and cloned windowless corridors. I know this because during my day of jury “service,” I was relentlessly pinballed down them half a dozen times and the overall feeling one has at the end of this is of being harassed. 

I don't inherently resent jury duty, and thought, once again, that it would provide an opportunity to learn a little bit about the system while discharging my duties as a citizen. I don't feel like I did any of that. After a week of thinking about it, it is hard to come away from the process with anything other than a profound feeling of waste; alleged criminals who waste time by allegedly committing alleged criminal deeds, wasted time, wasted money paid out to potential, rejected and serving jurors for wasted effort, attorneys who waste time and breath on ham-handed attempts to manipulate, who ask the same questions, time and again, wasting more and more time and effort and money. 

What is it all for? 

Twelve Angry Men is my favorite movie of all time. I watch it once a year, I own the play and I believe in the speechifying about duty and rights under the Constitution. Nothing about the process for reporting for federal jury selection is designed to maintain a sense of dutifully reporting for sacred honor detail, however. It begins with a letter and an online registration, then there is a series of phone calls every Monday for a month which can only be made after 5pm and tell you where to go the following day, if you are needed at all. This is annoying. Just tell me when to show up and I'll do it, but this “I can't make any plans for Tuesday, or indeed, the rest of the fucking week until after I make a phone call to a robot” bullshit is ridiculous. Of course, they waited until my 5^th phone call to tell me to report. Just when I thought I might miss it and started making plans again. 

Due to traffic on Interstate 24, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to travel approximately 35 miles. The bus down Murfreesboro Road would likely have been quicker. I paid nine dollars (reimbursed) for parking, and then had to take off my jacket, shoes, belt & keys and put them in a bucket while I ran the gauntlet of security. (The security guys were actually pretty nice, just not terribly helpful.) I then shared an elevator for eight floors with a non-uniformed Metro cop, two ladies who smelled like a perfume counter, and a nervous man sweating aluminum. I checked in at the desk and was asked how much I paid for parking (I would imagine some people lie and pad this number) and issued my all-important button. 

Sitting in a large room (big long Brain Candy conference tables, proliferate magazines, great view of Union Station, half-comfortable chairs) we were then subjected to daytime television from 8ish until about 9:30. The programming, if anything, fell off at this point while we stared at a DVD with various Justices and former jurors instilling us with importance and creating unrealistic expectations about what we were to endure. There was a lot of talk about solemnity and emotion and and the small deliberations room, and how “scary” things might become for us. Perhaps not the most effective rah-rah speech ever. Sometime after 10 we were escorted to actual court, a room so tall you'd get a nosebleed climbing it. This was filled with pews and pictures of old white men in black dresses. On the way there, a bailiff reminded me “You can't read in court,” and pointed at the book under my arm, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. He scowled when I took it in with me anyway.

Over the next seven hours, the same questions were asked of us in a variety of ways, and I was once again disqualified as a juror, I believe because of one or all of these three responses:

Do you have strong opinions about guns and gun control? Yes, I believe that handguns, rifles, assault weapons and extended magazines should have more restrictions on their proliferation and that licensing should be more restrictive, with more oversight.

Do you feel strongly that some drugs which are currently illegal should be legal? Yes, I think that marijuana's illegality is an anachronism and Colorado and Washington are good experiments to be watched closely.

Would it affect your assessment of witness testimony if you knew that the witness would be getting something in return for their testimony? That depends upon what they're getting and who they are. (This one actually turned into a three-minute back and forth between me and one of the defense attorneys, during which he scribbled something on paper.)

Shortly thereafter, I was released (actually what it is called) and went home, feeling as though the system was slightly broken. Everything is done to mechanize our "duty," attorneys manipulate juries until they get the most boring, homogenized group you can imagine, and endless time and money are spent trying to punish people for what they've allegedly gotten up to.

Bah.

Russia Is Stupid

Um, before I actually get into the topic the title implies I'll be covering, I'd like to say that Pussy Riot, what they're trying to do, their music (which I have to go look up lyric translations for), what they're enduring right now, in terms of being separated from their families and freedom, and the whole DIY, illegal performances, "music as non-commodity" vibe that they put into their tunes, image, videos and everything they do is inspiring, and warms pieces of my heart that typically go unwarmed. Now watch the new video if you haven't already. It is decidedly unstupid.

A portion of the band is still in jail, you know - there was another parole denial today. She's already done something like a year and change for protesting for under a minute; if you were old enough to be missing the free speech suppression of the old "Evil Empire" red days of the Cold War era - Putin's here for you. His government is going to sock people in jail and just leave 'em there if the speak out publicly against religion, trade, patriarchy or you know, suppression. This, of course, is the first point of Russian stupidity being addressed: How many of you would even know about Pussy Riot if they'd never been arrested and tried? I'm not encouraging the old school method of simply disappearing folks from the planet, but ignoring them probably might have worked? This method has a huge flaw that I've noticed, anyway.

But the Russian government won't do that because it's stupid - next case: "Gay." Russia has an abysmal GLBT rights record; failing to take any kind of cue from the parts of Europe that are becoming more institutionally accepting, they've chosen over the last several years to go the other way entirely - wishing that they didn't have gay people in Russia anymore and refusing to let people talk about the ones that they do have. If you're a gay Russian, you can't have a pride parade (in Moscow) for 100 years, you can't serve in the military or give blood, and finally, you can't say what you are. No saying "gay." Also, they'll mask up and beat the shit out of you if you protest. Or, as in the above example, toss your ass in jail. You know, for spreading your gay propaganda.

(I was going to post links to more articles from Pravda about some of this stuff, but their website is troublesome, and also a great example of this "propaganda" stuff you hear so much about from gay people. Have a look. Actually, the more I looked, the more I became totally confused. *slaps forehead* I shoulda had Izvestia!)

Finally, the main reason Russia's stupid (we've been alluding to him all along) is President Forever Vlad Putin, Jr. Junior's the man who had the moment with Dubya Monkeyface where they looked into one another's eyes and made a connection, which is so not gay. Other stuff that Putin does that proves he's a big masculine Russian bear includes finding unburied treasure, shirtlessly camping and fishing for camera crews, flying jets and drugging wildlife, riding motorbikes, racecars and submarines and having comic books about him. None of this, of course, is remotely staged or in aid of his image, and there are people on hand to assure anyone who wonders about this that all of his acts "are completely normal thing(s) to do."

Sure, Junior. Go ahead and have your fun. Stupid bastard.

Presidential Football Dream

So, last night I had this dream.

There was a huge open lawn space upon which someone had scrawled a hasty gridiron and thrown up some rudimentary uprights. It was for football, and I, and some random acquaintances and friends of mine, had the honor of playing the sport of kings with a number of American historical political figures, mostly Presidents.

Reagan's not as good as you'd think, it turns out. Obama runs the ball like crazy, but then so does Teddy Roosevelt. And JFK. Lincoln's a great QB; makes sense, all those years of splitting rails giving him upper body strength and his height gives him reach and command of the field, while the debates with Douglas have instilled in him the quick thinking you need from a team leader. Ford and Nixon can both play, but Ike's nothing special. You've never seen a nose tackle like Taft, though McKinley was right in there. I remember seeing Truman and Grant on the sidelines, chatting with FDR. Alexander Hamilton was keeping score and Barry Goldwater was calling plays for one side. Henry Kissinger and John Madden were doing commentary.

Offspring was playing their half dozen or so songs I know while the game was happening. There was a little raised stage near one of the endzones, and they were set up, just running through this six song set list, over and over. I'm not particularly fond of Offspring.

You think this is a geeky dream, but just wait.

During "Come Out and Play" I was in the midst of trying to tackle Bill Clinton and bring him down before he could score when Al Gore got in the mix for some unknown reason. It was totally illegal - there was definitely a horsecollar in there - and since I already had a pretty good lock on Slick Willie and just needed to put my weight into it I kept with the play, but from within the dream, I began to instantly analyze whether or not maybe this little scrum represented Gore's need to separate himself and his post-Washington legacy from the negative aspects of the Clinton White House.

And then I woke up.

2013: The Year of Listening

I had this unfortunate moment last night.

See, in the hours leading up to midnight, I had been stacking canned goods(by date) in my den while listening to the news programs about the fiscal cliff, various celebrities, and the general state of our society. My shotguns and automatic weapons were cleaned and loaded and ready, and I had shored up the backyard against rear attacks, the land cleared, and lines of sight established. The right people had all been called, and the secret cache was full of gold, the back room with salted pork and pickled vegetables. We had been sitting around the campfire the previous evening singing songs of protest and overthrow while painting the banners we would fly when the time came at midnight on New Year's Eve. New utilities on, boots broken in, maps of the area committed to memory, I was whipped into a frenzy and ready to be an instrumental part of the bloody revolt I thought was coming at midnight. We would kiss in 2012, and awaken in 2013 in a world of our making, under a government we held and controlled as the skies blackened with the fires of passion and the tree of liberty was fed by the blood of those who had foolishly resisted us.

All of this was in my mind - clear and balanced on knife's edge - as I broke the traditional kiss and smashed out of my house and into the streets smelling of gun oil and adrenaline rage shouting "BACKS AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS," only to find that instead of revolution at midnight it was a New Year's Resolution at midnight that we were supposed to make.

Boy is my face red. Maybe next year.

Your Nightmares Are True

Deep in your atrophied and shrunken black poison pump, you knew it all along. The voices in the night, in your head, in abandoned hallways and in the back of liquor stores behind dumpsters and prostitutes told you who the hell he was, all along - and they were right.

Obama's got a pineal eye - they cover it with make-up - and he's a leader captain general of the vanguard of an invading race from beyond this dimension with perceptions that far outstrip anything a burgeoning panopticon can muster; he sees when you are sleeping/he knows when you're awake/he knows when you're a lying terrorist who needs a CIA drone up the ass. He's not American - he's quantum-American from a space dimension all around you invisible - that's how he's warping so many minds.

He's coming out of a toxic cloud of painless opium fumes and stale cigarette smoke straight out of a 1950's cathouse and he's snatching up your guns and your knives and your cudgels and your Dixie flags and your weapons so that when he comes around with his pan-racial, post-racial racist agenda - hating everyone that's not the mix he is, exactly - you're defenseless, and you have to wear the featureless grey coverall as institutional non-race mayonnaise post-consumer no property Lennon/Lenin communism kicks in under a totalitarian regime we asked for, we begged for, because we let that smooth-talking motherfucker into the White House and he didn't save us, he didn't save our country from itself, he saved it for himself, the last and most delectable treat on the tree of conquest. The government's going to get so goddamn big that you'll be able to see it standing on your neck while it's walking away in front of you and yet - it'll still seem like everything's out of control and going down the shitter because the chaos makes you seek comfort from the father figure daddy Obama.

Barack Obama's going to force abortions on everyone - he's going to do the abortions himself as the man-in-black leader of a cadre of ruthlessly efficient abortibots designed to infiltrate and make certain that everyone has a forced abortion and birth control rammed down their gullets like everyone's a fertile musket of baby-making madness and the only way to control the flow is to black bag your children in the dead of night, mandatory birth control for all sexes, forced abortions that you can write off on your taxes and the utter destruction of Christ's church here on Earth under the foot of a giant Pro-Abortion Monster wearing an Obama loincloth and talking like Tarzan but with Janene Garofalo's voice.

Despite his affiliation with a controversial Christian Church, he's a Muslim. A secret Muslim who manages somehow to promote the secret and shadowy agenda of Islamists everywhere while also speaking up for women's equality, gay marriage and praying - secretly - five times a day under the watchful eye of the Secret Service. He learned his Islamist ideology and secret handshake and agreed in a blood and semen pact to corrupt America for terrorism in a madrassa in a foreign country because of course, in spite of his birth certificate, which is an expert fake concocted by allies who manipulated media to create Barack Hussein Obama as a candidate in the first place - brainwashing you all - he was born somewhere else. In another fucking dimension, I know, but you don't know that, you only feel it. The big trick is, though - he doesn't believe a word of it, because he's got a personal relationship with the alien space god through his connections as the pan-dimensional messiah of hope and change. It's a good train; get on it.

He's gay, too. He's a gayesque bisexual pansexual straight guy who's just cool enough to get it on with anything that moves, and he's going to force the omnisexual agenda down the throats of all straight people everywhere like a load from a fully fluffed and hung damn ready pornstar just waiting to pump you full of hot ideological ejaculate that will disgust you all and damn you to hell and erode gender lines and whatever else you're afraid of, because that's what he is - the embodiment of all your fears, phobia made flesh, walking, talking, looking cooler than you, staying calm, cool and collected, a near-emotionless robot drone on a mission to bomb your America into dust and replace it with conspiracy Shadow America, waiting just beneath the surface - a quick left and you're there.

The media sold you a comprehensive nightmare, and you all bought in, with your hysteria and your need for change and promise of a new day - and you'll get it, cold sweating and wrapped in chintzy sheets under a steel-cold dawn and riding on the back of a mongrel demon from places you can't bear to consider. We know you believe it, and for you that's like knowing, and in the swirl of thoughts that echo in your brainpan you can't exactly nail down but you know you're in a nightmare of filth and lies and you can't figure out how this happened and you're surrounded all the time.

Your madness is real. Obama is the impossible sum of all of these things. Nightmare made flesh.

It's all under control.

Have a nice day.

Advice to Republican Friends

Republican friends and family of mine who read this blog - both of you (rimshot) - think of this as an intervention. Because I care. Well. In an abstract way that crunchy hippie nice people friends of mine compel me to care. I care because I have to.

On this blog, you may have noticed, I frequently use rudely sophomoric grammar constructions to not-so-subtly imply that Republicans are deplorably immoral, stupid, socially backward, and often crazy. "Right wingnuts," "Republicunts" and "Republican'ts" are a few of these; there are others if you go and look. I made it through the entire Dubya presidency wthout ever referring to him by his given name, opting for the more descriptively accurate "Dubya Monkeyface." The time for these half-assedly witty monikers is coming to an end, though - soon, all a citizen of these United States will need to utter in order to connote a tragically lowered intelligence, fried logic and societally unacceptable levels of craziness will be "Republican." It'll be a derogatory term all by its lonesome, and how long do you want to be associated with that? There's already an "R-word," so I don't even know how we'll discuss you people and call elections once your name is a slur - but I'm looking forward to it.

You, individually, on the other hand, should get out now, while the getting's good. It might already be too late - I don't know if you can escape a tornado of bullshit like what's being spouted from this incontinent elephant's ass without getting a little of it on you. Let's face it; the GOP (and its bastard child, the Tea Party) in this country has long been a shelter for those who don't give a fuck for anyone but themselves and have a need to justify this propensity by associating themselves with something that looks like an ideology, or failing that, surrounding themselves with similarly inclined people. (I would have said "like-minded," and in fact, went back and replaced it, because it implies a mind at work, and I'm not certain that's accurate.)

You can prove a Republican doesn't care about anyone but himself with any argument, but I'm going to use gun control, because it gives me an excuse to draw attention to this before it drops out of the public memory forever. Only Republican conservative thinking would argue, in the wake of multiple instances of gun violence that people should maintain relatively unfettered access to guns, because of course, they don't want to give up their rights to guns. They'll tell you that it's because guns don't kill people - which is true, but it would be a lot fucking harder to build houses if you banned bricks and mortar. They'll also try to whip out the 2nd Amendment on you, but that was 221 years ago and a flat backward refusal to re-evaluate texts after that long a period is religion, not governance.

Some solid examples of backward-ass thinking have come from the Repubbies this week, which is why I think it might be time for you rats to get the hell off the ship. First up is Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who shared with us what happens when you speak using your ass instead of your head with his now famous definition of rape biology: "It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down." This begs all kind of questions: How the fuck did this guy get elected? I mean, I know Missouri votes for dead people, but come on. Who are these doctors; Mengele, Doom and Frankenstein? How does a "legitimate" rape differ from an illegitimate one? Is there a 'level of effort' consideration here? Finally, the female body does have ways "to try to shut the whole thing down;" they're called mace, knives, keys, fists, and self-defense classes. Also, they can vote against Republicans like your dumbass self. Maybe you could for once focus on the male body's way of shutting the whole thing down - NOT RAPING PEOPLE. Why don't you address that, halfwit?

Predictably, a firestorm of criticism - some sincere and some staged for effect - landed on Akin's goober head and everyone short of the Ghost of Abe Lincoln himself condemned Akin's comments, including Romney, who has to. Everyone's calling on him to step down and stop running, but true to the monomaniacally zealous thinking of current Republicans, he's staying in there, not giving a shit if anyone thinks he should. There's a point at which sticking to your guns in the face of adversity becomes bull-headed arrogant jackassery, and that point is distantly fading in Akin's rear-view.

Today Akin got some help from Iowa Republican Steve King, (co-sponsor of the "redefining rape" bill from last year with Akin and Eddie Munster-looking mook Paul Ryan) who contributed his own turd of wisdom to the conversation by stating "I've never heard of a girl getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest." He went on to say that he'd be open to a conversation on the subject, but that no one had ever presented this information to him in any personal way. So he's a maniac, but he needs to have his offices filled up with people who've had to deal with pregnancies caused by statutory rape or incest, just so he can't say shit like this again. Theoretically. I mean, it won't work, because facts aren't part of the equation with Republicans - beliefs are WAY more important.

As demonstrated by the Texas Republican Party platform's language which now includes this little nugget: "We oppose the teaching of higher order thinking skills, critical thinking skills, and similar programs that are simply a re-labeling of Outcome Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." Really, this is just the first step to "Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace," but you would have had to have read Orwell's 1984 to know that, and Republicans don't read anything not ghostwritten for one of their radio or TV talking heads. This is the crown jewel of ignorance for the GOP, and it's astonishing that it comes from the state that de facto controls our textbook standards nationwide.

So Republicans in Texas are against higher order and critical thinking skills, because those things frighten them with the questions and whatnot. You can tell they don't like questions, because they're also against early childhood education - one wonders how they handle "Why is the sky blue" when their unfortunate kids ask that one. To answer accurately is to educate. Hmmm. I think these are people who could have used some additional behavior modification - and what's so wrong with that, anyway? What do you dickheads imagine (if you can imagine) laws and social mores are for? They've been modifying my behavior for other people's benefit since 1974. Finally, no one - and especially not a child - should have any belief that is "fixed." If it's fixed against data, discussion, facts and reason, it's wrong; it's a stick lodged in the ass of idiocy, and you pricks stuck it there.

O, jump! Republicans, jump while you can from the ship of the USS GOP - it is a crippled and perilously listing craft; escape into the icy waters of thinking for yourself - board another ship if you wish, but please don't lash yourself to the mast of stupidity as the whirlpool consumes you!