October 2008 archive

Oct 18 2008

REVIEW OF “W”

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Quite apart from the acting or the production values of the film, “W” very nearly accurately reflects the relationships not only of Bush and his father but of the entire Bush cabinet.

I would take the relationship of George W with George H a large step further.

I believe George W. Bush intentionally made a mess of his presidency. He did this essentially through the invasion of Iraq. The purpose of which was simply to punish his father. His father regarded him as a “screw up”. His presidency has been a screw up, but not by accident. It has been intentional. George W. Bush knew everything he was doing was the “wrong” thing to do. It is not a question of intelligence, it’s a question of intention. Any fool could see that an invasion of Iraq was the “wrong thing” to do.

The purpose of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was to punish his father by screwing up on a monumental presidential level. The purpose was to destroy the Bush name, by destroying in any way possible, the image of America. The image of his father. This is a typical famalial pattern. The son keeps doing self destructive things. The upstanding father cannot understand why. It’s not because the son is stupid. It’s because the son is punishing the father. It’s really trite.

You can simply reverse everything George W. Bush has said about “America” and freedom and his love of freedom and of Bush’s often stated perception about “those who hate freedom”. It is George Bush who hates America, not Al Queda. Al Queda is a myth. Al Queda is used as a vehicle for George W. Bush  to displace his hatred of America. And America is George W. Bush’s father.

Now, we see in the film that all of George W’s advisors eventually indulge George Bush. They indulge him, they enable him. I believe this is accurate. Dick Cheney, is a provincial and essientially unsophisticated man has achieved through political experience the appearance of sophistication. But he is an actor with avuncular “chops”. Cheney is an extremely paranoid individual and is certainly a force that is aligned, for different reasons, not suicidal, with George W. Bush and his need to self destruct. It’s as if George W is saying  to his father, “Oh you think i’m a screw up huh?…I’ll show you how much of a screw up I can be. I’ll screw things up so bad it will make your head spin. I’ll destroy everything in the world that you like, I’ll destroy the world as you know it.” And that is exactly what he has done. George W.  has unraveled everything his father did during his presidency.

Almost all the the important treaties, all the foreign and domestic policies of his father have been thrown out.

I thought the actors were fine in the film, but it’s really irrelevant. The point of Bush’s presidency, the essence of this bizzarre human failure is brought out in the film.

Oliver Stone is not dumb.

What is not brought out and is a topic for another film, is the reason why an entire population of people indulged this person for 8 years in his utterly pointless wars. Not to mention, of course, his destruction of the American economy for which no one is blaming him.

Why hasn’t one senator, one congressman, one journalist, one somebody somewhere stood up and called George Bush out. I’m mean really called him out. He is a very distrubed person. He is psychologically distrubed, deeply disturbed. His disturbance is not unusual. But it is unusual for a person to become president WHOSE INTENTION IS TO FAIL.

Perhaps the destruction of the American economy was an unforseen but inevitable bonus for George W. That’s another issue.

Large parts of the American population want to die. Large parts of America are secretly suicidal. They use religion and the excuse of the “rapture” to cover their simple desire to die. They prefer to live in heaven. They don’t want to be here on Earth all that much. So, we can say, as conservative as they may be, they really don’t care all that much about “America”. The real interest of the fundamentalist is “Heaven”.  I call that being suicidal.

They are George Bush’s base.

Oct 18 2008

Obama and the Derivatives Merchants

Original article, by Glen Ford, via blackagendareport.com:

“…in many respects, working with [Barack Obama] will be very much like working with President Clinton…. I think he will be just fine.”

– Top Obama adviser Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chair, currently an executive with Citigroup, August 28, 2008.

Oct 18 2008

It Was Nice KNowing You.

I apologize, but as soon as I conclude writing this diary I’m going to walk down the block and set my neighbor Jill on fire.

She’s in her her mid-to-late 50’s, is a lovely, smart women who has bought birthday and holiday gifts for both of my children (has even cared for our dog when she got sick) but by the definition of Michelle Bachman, representative from Minnesota in this video…

…poor Jill is an un-American, liberal leftist… and given that she’s acted on these views by protesting and writing letters espousing her views… she has, essentially, committed treason and therefore must die.

Oct 18 2008

Friday Night at 8: Work Glow

There’s a kind of beauty to work, to labor, and in these tumultuous times that beauty just glows.

Last time I saw the glow was on 9/11.  I walked home from work in Midtown and bought a sandwich at the fake French bakery across the street.  It struck me very forcefully that the woman behind the counter was still at work while I was able to go home.  We didn’t know yet whether the attacks were over or not, the city was in shock, and yet I was able to buy a sandwich and later to go to the drugstore to pick up a few things, where yet another woman rang up my order.  She didn’t leave work either.

Of course one the best known examples I can recall of this glow was when John Swigert, Jr. and James Lovell who, with Fred Haise Jr., made up the crew of the US’s Apollo 13 moon flight communicated to Earth that something had gone technically wrong.  The real phrase is “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” which morphed into the well known phrase “Houston, we have a problem.”

That line was the sound of work, that glow I’m writing about.

In the world of teevee, there is Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise.  When the going got dangerous, they were at their workstations, fully engaged in the situation.  Scotty got the most flack, imo.

I’ve been doing diary rescue over at Daily Kos for the downticket races.  The rescued diaries get put into one big roundup and the whole thing goes on the front page.

I’ve been reading folks who have been posting every day on the races they’re involved in, and often this is on top of their canvassing work and such.

When I think about the last couple weeks, with big changes going on all over the place, I am seeing the glow in those diaries, the ability to focus on the situation confronting you and do the work you see needs to be done — with no boss, no paycheck, not a whole lot of comments most of the time, just to do it because you think it should be done.  That’s the glow.

There is not a poster here at Docudharma who I’m not getting that glow from.

Just sayin’.

Oct 18 2008

10/15 Debate Essay Rescue

We had some good essays that kind of got lost during the debate and I thought I’d mention them so that if they escaped your attention you might pay a visit.

and

are pretty October 15th specific, celebrating anniversaries like they do.

and

might get a promotion, but they also might slide down.

If you want to see each and every artist’s original conception I encourage you to bookmark the DocuDharma Essays Button.

Oct 18 2008

Baby Beluga

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

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A Beluga Whale

Some great news, and a slap in the face to Sarah Palin.  The New York Times reports:

The federal government on Friday placed beluga whales that live in Alaska’s Cook Inlet on the endangered species list, rejecting efforts by Gov. Sarah Palin to keep the whales from coming under the increased protections.

The relatively small, whitish whales, sometimes visible from downtown Anchorage in the inlet’s silvery water, declined by almost 50 percent during the late 1990’s, and federal scientists say they have not rebounded despite protections that included limiting subsistence hunting by Native Alaskans. About 375 whales have been counted in Cook Inlet each of the last two years, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“In spite of protections already in place, Cook Inlet beluga whales are not recovering,” James Balsiger, an acting assistant administrator in charge of the agency’s fisheries programs, said in a written statement announcing that the whales were in danger of extinction.

The announcement, whose timing was tied to a predetermined schedule under the Endangered Species Act, drew attention once again to Ms. Palin’s positions on environmental issues. The governor, the Republican nominee for vice president, has come under scrutiny for her ambiguous statements about climate change and her administration’s effort to prevent another species, the polar bear, from being declared a threatened species.

And why is Governor Palin opposed to Belugas?  Wanna guess?

As with the polar bear, Ms. Palin’s administration had fought the beluga listing because of its potential to restrict coastal and offshore oil and gas development. The beluga listing also could affect a proposed bridge over Knik Arm that would connect Anchorage to the Matanuska-Valley and Ms. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla.

Arrgh.

And here’s an appropriate way to celebrate, with a song from Raffi my kids used to love back in the day:

Oct 18 2008

So did I mention Pat Buchanan is a fascist?

So did I mention Pat Buchanan is a fascist?

He supports policies that would lead to an authoritarian corporatist state dedicated to global hegemony.

He admires fascist politicians, like explicitly Hilter.

Pat Buchanan says Adolf Hitler only sought to dominate Europe, making him, “no physical threat to the US” after 1940. He observes that to push Japan into starting a war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt “froze all Japanese assets, cutting off trade, including oil.” He refers to Roosevelt as “a base appeaser of Stalin” and that his administration was “shot through with Communist spies and traitors.” “In World War II,” he writes, “patriots argued the wisdom of FDR’s ‘Europe First’ policy that left our men on Corregidor to the mercy of the butchers of Bataan”. He says, “Responsibility for the lack of American preparedness at the time of Pearl Harbor rests wholly with FDR. He had been in power nine years and had controlled both Houses of Congress for all nine of those years. Blaming our lack of preparedness on the isolationists (or even on the Communists) is the shilling of court historians”.

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said despite Hitler’s anti-Jewish and genocidal tendencies he was “an individual of great courage…Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”

He’s also a racist-

In a 2002 speech, he said, “In the next 50 years, the Third World will grow by the equivalent of 30 to 40 new Mexicos. If you go to the end of the century, the white and European population is down to about three percent. This is what I call the death of the West. I see the nations dying when the populations die. I see the civilization dying. It is under attack in our own countries, from our own people.

And believes in Kulturekampf.

Pat Buchanan says that America is divided by a culture war. He calls it a conflict over the power to define society’s definition of right and wrong. Fronts include environmentalism, feminism, abortion, gay rights, freedom of religion, women in combat, display of the Confederate Flag, recognition of Christmas and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the controversy given this idea of culture wars was itself evidence of polarization.

Pat Buchanan is an unreconstructed, brownshirted, unionist beating Fascist and his opinions about it or instituting a McCarthyite witchhunt on Capitol Hill for communist lefty fifth columnist Congressmen are hardly unbiased.

Fascism is a totalitarian and nationalist ideology. It is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and which seeks to solve such problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation, protecting the nation from what fascism deems as the excesses of the internationalist ideologies of capitalism and communism by advocating a Third Position, promoting the territorial defense or expansion of a nation through a constant state of military preparedness and promotion of militarism as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.

Are you listening Tweety?

Oct 18 2008

Friday Philosophy: No Hate

Perhaps as penance for something I did in a past life, I am prone to perusing the back pages of Daily Kos.  Like Diogenes looking for a human being among his fellow Greeks, I search for those who might learn that hatred starts small and begins with the words we use.

I seek to teach.  Mostly I discover people who are unwilling to learn.  I find people who are so invested in their juvenile attempt at humor that they can’t stop to learn why it is juvenile, why it is demeaning, not to its supposed targets, but to those whom it actually hits, and as the conversation progresses (I refuse to give up the hope that everyone can learn not to hate), I get to learn how deep and varied their hatred actually is.

I find pseudo-intellectual  analysis of why only the so-called normal people deserve equality in this society.  Upon challenging their reasoning, I often find the same people have a very low opinion of education.  I ask questions that don’t get answered.  Apparently, those questions do have an effect, however.  You’d be amazed at the number of times people assume that the questions I ask must be asked in anger and respond in kind…and never answer the question.

And I find hatred, both the small and the large of it.

Oct 17 2008

Music for capitalism’s crisis!

Antmusic for Sexpeople!

And yes, at one time I was an Antperson (probably still am)!

Oct 17 2008

Four at Four

  1. So the Washington Post reports that Bush defends the bailout and says the plan was the ‘last resort’. Bush said his administration has been “systematic and aggressive” trying to thaw the credit freeze and urged Americans to be patient with his administration’s efforts.

    “The federal government has responded to this crisis with systematic and aggressive measures to protect the financial security of the American people,” Bush said in a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “… It took a while for the credit system to freeze up; it will take a while for the credit system to thaw.”

    Bush went on to blame Bill Clinton for his and the economy’s problems saying “the roots of the crisis go back ‘more than a decade'”. Actually, many of the problems go back to August 1987, when Alan Greenspan became the 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

    Yesterday, the NY Times reported that the Banks are likely to hold tight to the bailout money. “Since mid-2007, when the credit crisis erupted, the country’s nine largest banks have written down the value of their troubled assets by a combined $323 billion.”

    For every dollar the banks earned during the industry’s most prosperous years, they have now wiped out $1.06.

    Even with the capital from the government, analysts say, the banking industry still needs to raise around $275 billion in light of the looming losses…

    Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. is urging them to use their new capital soon. On Monday, Mr. Paulson unveiled plans to provide $125 billion to nine banks on terms that were more favorable than they would have received in the marketplace. The government, however, has offered no written requirements about how or when the banks must use the money.

    “There is no express statutory requirement that says you must make this amount of loans,” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency. “But the economics work so that it is in their interest to do so.”

    Marketplace, on public radio, reported that all this Unused cash piling up at the Fed. The banks are not lending and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash are now at the Federal Reserve. The reserve balances “have hit historic highs in the past few weeks” and have “gotten even bigger” from the bailout.

    Now $265 billion are in now at the Fed in reserve accounts and the Fed is paying interest on those deposits. So much for thawing the credit markets.

  2. Setting the stage for the next two years at the United Nations, the NY Times reports Three nations win security council seats.

    Turkey, Austria and Japan won nonpermanent seats on the United Nations Security Council on Friday, defeating Iceland and Iran in elections in the General Assembly…

    They join Uganda, for Africa, and Mexico in taking up the five rotating seats on the 15-seat Security Council for the 2009 and 2010 sessions.

Four at Four continues with the Iranian revolution and Obama’s gray hair.

Oct 17 2008

Pony Party: Crabby

I’m still in Mexico – staying at a place with no Internet access (unexpectedly) and no TV.  So last night my husband and I amused ourselves by capturing the little crabs that wandered into our condo and returning them to the beach.  Three crabs were successfully trapped and relocated.  

In a few days we return to the US.  We’ll be happier than clams when we get our Internets back.  

Oct 17 2008

Thank You George Bush

Once the American Idol election frenzy dies down and we wake up from the nightmare of the last eight years and look around at the pile of shit we are neck deep in thanks to George “the Torturer ” Bush and his magical destructo administration, there will be only one conclusion possible. We need to build a new reality. We need to select a new world track. We need to create a new future.

Nothing and no one could have done a better job of proving the old world track we were going down just plain didn’t work.

Nothing and no one could have done a better job of proving that an economy based solely on further enriching the already super-rich is bad for everyone BUT the super-rich.

Nothing and no one could have done a better job of decimating the world destroying American Military and Economic Empire. Of, perhaps, ending the entire concept of Nation State Empires.

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Nothing and no one could have done a better job of exposing (by arousing it fully) the hate and intolerance of Right Wing America.

Nothing and no one could have done a better job of demonstrating the hypocrisy of a supposed Republican Moral Superiority by indulging the Right Wing’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies, from domestic spying to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Nothing and no one could have done a better job of discrediting and destroying  every single meme, policy, philosophy, idea and talking point of Republicanism.

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