Cheny-Palin 2012: a dream come true

…has a new name. “Traitor Joe.” That may only be funny to people in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut… and coming soon: New Jersey and Minnesota!

I woke up about three o’clock this morning realizing how much our thinking is imprisoned by the language of others. Case in point ‘Jobless Recovery.’ Even smart people like Thom Hartmann and Economics professors use the term.
Wikipedia defines jobless recovery or jobless growth as “…a phrase used by economists, especially in the United States, to describe the recovery from a recession which does not produce strong growth in employment.”
I think the idea of a jobless recovery just shows how screwed up our thinking is. Why is a recovery only measured by growth in the GDP, or rise in stock prices? If people aren’t working, then it doesn’t matter if the Dow is over 10,000. The economy is still sick.
Calling what we are in a ‘jobless recovery” is like calling a glass of orange juice a “vodka-less screwdriver,” or an empty platter a “meatless pot roast.”

I put together this short video because I’ve been thinking about political caricatures, and how important they are to American politics. One of the first was drawn by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 to urge American independence. Here it is:

Pretty tame compared with some more recent ones, huh?

I’ve noticed with the current spate of Obama-as-[insert your villain here] cartoons floating around, people are shocked, shocked to see such disrespect to our President. But it’s been going on for a long time.
Here’s a cool one from Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly:

In 1871 the Republican New York Times ran a scathing
series of exposés of corruption in the Tammany Hall-controlled Democratic administration of New York City, and Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast quickly joined the campaign.
A bloodthirsty Tammany mascot has mauled the Republic, symbolized by Columbia, having broken her shield, the ballot, through corruption. The rotund emperor, Tammany Boss William Magear Tweed, enjoys the spectacle, sitting among other well-known Democratic politicians.
The allusion to the historic slaughter of innocent Christians in Roman arenas—Rome now being the center of Catholicism—was particularly powerful, as was the way Nast drew the rampaging tiger looking directly at the reader, clearly its next victim.
My contribution to this fine tradition… hopefully less tedious than the spate of Obama ones:

At a meeting of conservative activists, this was their reaction upon hearing the news that we had lost our bid to host the 2016 Olympics:

I guess I’m old-fashioned. I thought that real Americans rooted for their country, no matter what they felt about the President. Did the people who hated Roosevelt secretly root for the Depression to get worse? Did they cheer the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
I confess it makes me a bit sick to my stomach. I didn’t like George Bush, but I would never cheer our country’s failure. Maybe those people really want an Al Queda attack on US soil so they can cheer Bin Laden. “A thousand Americans dead! Whoo-ho!”
A while ago, I would have said that’s bullshit. Now, I wonder.

Florida freshman Democrat Alan Grayson described the Republicans’ health care plan on the floor of the House.

Ohhh… wrong President.

This morning on the Stephanie Miller Show, John Fuegelsang pointed out that when the Dixie Chicks, while in Great Britain, said they were ashamed that Bush was their President, they were called traitors in the right-wing media.
But when Sarah Palin criticizes our President while in Hong Kong, there’s not a peep.
Next to the definition of hypocrisy in the dictionary is a picture of the GOP elephant.
Much better than my Jane Fonda analogy: who remembers her?

Ms. Palin took her show on the road Wednesday, in a speech to CSLA, and Asian investment firm. She criticized the Obama administration’s foreign policy, suggesting it made the US appear weak in the eyes of the world.
In July of 1972, actress Jane Fonda visited Hanoi, North Vietnam.

She harshly criticized the US war effort, saying that we were deliberately bombing the dikes along the Red River to destroy the country.
In 1988 Jane Fonda apologized for her claims and for the photo above, saying she would regret it until she died.
Will Sarah Palin apologize for bad-mouthing our government in time of war?

Saturday, September 12, Dick Armey (or Penis Navy as the Stephanie Miller Show likes to call him), his hearty band of corporate shills and the frightened followers who’ve drunk their Kool-Aid© came out in a smallish force in Washington, DC, fighting to protect us from health care. Actually, they came out to protest against the bailout, against the Federal Reserve, against a Kenyan/Nazi/Socialist/Martian President, and even against a dead Kennedy.

Health care was just a small item on their angry agenda.
I can’t help feeling sorry for a lot of the folks who showed up on the Mall. Every major social change (and remaking our medical care system is majorly major) makes people scared. And sadder yet, those people’s fears are being stoked by Dick Armey, media leaders and others who got their noses deep up the asses of the insurance industry.
These are the spiritual descendants of people who’ve been on the wrong side of every major social change since (and including) the Civil War. Trust-busting, national parks, World War II, public works projects, Social Security, Medicare… whatever it is, they’re against it.
The kid of things they do support, tend to be the kind of things that make a lot of money for them and their friends, and impoverish many of us.
These are the folks who brought you the savings and loan debacle in the late 80s, and our current financial woes.
I don’t think they want to do these things; they’ve just victims of their own greed, or ideology, or both. Dick Armey had plenty to do with getting rid of the Glass Stegal Act, which from its inception in the 30s kept our banking system stable, until it was repealed in the 90s (thanks to Bill Clinton as well).
Now look at your bank. It’s like slot machine; you can put your money in, but you don’t necessarily get it out.
But poor the poor people on the Mall Saturday didn’t realize who was leading them. They just knew they’re frightened and angry, and some guy was pointing a finger at a black President and saying “blame him!”
They’re heading off a cliff.

Somebody makes the point that people like Joe “Liar” Wilson are stalking horses for opponents of health care reform. Like the shouters in the town halls, they intend that no one is talking about health care. They’re talking about the shouting.