Babylon Has Fallen

Well, it's gotten down to a matter of days before the chiselers, cullions and charlatans that are the Republican Party kick off their 2012 Convention slated to run August 27 to August 30 in Tampa, Florida to be excruciatingly exact...and those funny things I promised so long ago have now materialized. In spades.

Babylon Has Fallen

"The Cain campaign is mainly down the drain..." --Anon.

I simply must confess to massive, utter astonishment at the complete and utter collapse of Pizza man Herman Cain. After the initial revelations of sexual harassment, he just metamorphosed into a pool of muddy water rolling down the gutter into a sewer! Oh, sure, I knew he was a mean, small-souled bigot and dumber than dust bunnies: EVERYBODY knew that...but the fact that it was finally his female trouble which did him in came as a full-fledged between-the-eyes surprise. That he wasn't even bright enough to convincingly lie his way out came as an even bigger one!

Did he think that nobody would ever find out what a sexual dirtbag he was on top of everything else?? And how is it that Republicans just can't be bothered to behave themselves?

So now Noot, everyone's least favorite Grinch, has a commanding lead of the GOP field as they go skidding into the Iowa primaries, mere weeks away. And Democrats can barely contain their glee; they are positively giddy at the prospect of reducing him to smelly dust and foul fragments in front of God and everybody during a bare-knuckle head-to-head contest for the White House. This isn't even funny any longer, folks, it's finally entered into the realm of the absurd and ridiculous. Let me out of this funhouse, somebody: I'm not laughing...

Babylon Has Fallen

Funny?!? By George, it's been nothing less than downright hysterical out there in Wingnut Land lately! without one single electable candidate in their field--and that dismal collection of or mutants is now locked in for good or ill--Republicans are running around in panic circles trying desperately to salvage SOMETHING out of an election that's looming just about 13 months away...and looking suspiciously like it may just sweep them with one single stroke. It doesn't get much funnier to me than this...

They've boxed themselves in securely by trying to blame Barack Obama fior their own profligate spending for years under George Dimbulb Bush... and then writing a letter to Ben Bernanke asking him to refrain from helping mend this broken economy and keep unemployment high. No, I'm not kidding. Let us also not forget that they've voted--twice!--to bring Medicare crashing down with Paul Ryan's catastrophic budget scheme...which even a majority of THEIR OWN PARTY opposes. And as I sit here writing this, they're positioned to sink the President's Jobs plan without a trace. A large majority of the electorate favors that one.

Here's a question: If the GOP actually lost their minds, how could anyone tell??

Babylon Has Fallen

Babylon Has Fallen

Greetings, friends and neighbors! It's your everlovin' Angel Of Mercy back yet again to help jump-start a bright and shiny New Year...not to mentioning providing some much-needed snark and sass to balance that dreadful Republican majority which now infests the House of Representatives. The all seem to have worn their baggy, polka-dotted trousers, their wide, flat shoes and their official honking Bozo noses to open up the 112th Congress.

But more about THOSE clowns in subsequent posts.

At the moment, I'm here to tell you about something with which you may not be familiar as yet. This time last year, two noble denizens of Progressive Blogsylvania put their heads together to hammer out a deliciously subversive idea and embark upon a witty and wonderful podcast that you absolutely need to hear if you have not done so already. And right now I'm sending them a big, fat, juicy birthday greeting!

Babylon Has Fallen

Back on April 29th, I tossed off a quick and dirty post entitled The New Face of the GOP about the spate of murderous violence which was beginning to define the rightwing in America. I will freely admit I didn't give it my fullest effort due to certain ongoing personal difficulties; just not my best work. Well, here we are a month and a half later and I am shocked and deeply saddened to have been so accurate in my analysis. These aren't the sorts of things I wanted to be right about, friends and neighbors. This isn't the world I want to be living in.

Since that post, Doctor George Tiller, a provider of late-term abortions in Wichita, Kansas was apparently shot and killed on Sunday, May 31st, while he was IN CHURCH by Scott Roeder, a member of the virulent anti-government Freemen group and a poster on the website of Operation Rescue, an abortioNazi outfit founded by Randall Terry. (Terry himself was imprisoned for arranging to send presidential candidate Bill Clinton an aborted fetus at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. True fact.) On Wednesday, June 10th, Security guard Stephen T. Johns was ostensibly shot and killed by 88-year-old racist and dedicated anti-Semite James W. von Brunn, a radical rightwing toon who wrote a book called Kill The Best Gentiles, and once tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board. I'm not kidding. Just days later, on Saturday, June 12th, James Eugene Bush, Shawna Forde and James Gaxiola, all of whom have connections with a nativist extremist outfit, have been arrested for a home invasion in southern Arizona that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead and an unidentified woman wounded.

Does anyone out there think that this string of horrifying events is just a coincidence..?

Has it occurred to anyone else out there that the vast, immutable forces of fate and Karma are conspiring to make the radical right appear even more preposterously irrational than usual? Things have gotten very scary of late...

Babylon Has Fallen

It has been expedient for three decades of GOP image-manipulators--Chuck Colson, Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove--to portray American politics as two competing ideologies, liberalism vs. conservatism. Propaganda and mass marketing are best served by simplification: Us and them. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. "If you're not with us, you're against us." Subtlety, nuance and inference are inevitably lost in a message aimed at the lowest common denominator of, say, television viewers. (Whose taste is altogether suspect anyway if they're entertained by such benighted drivel as 'Survivor.') There is undeniable power in the childish simplicity of strict, polar opposites...except that in this case, as is the standard state of affairs with rightwing machinations, This particular allegation is absolutely unsullied by any hint of truth.

Political thought, like pretty much all human thought on nearly ANY given subject, has no clear delineations; everything is a matter of degrees. It can best be thought of as a spectrum, complex and inter-related. In a rainbow, for example, at what exact point does blue become green? Show me. Conservatism and liberalism are not opposites, although they ARE very different. This concept may be simple, but this distinction is crucial to understanding the kabuki dance between Democrats and Republicans down through the decades as well as the anti-American face of conservatism itself.

Babylon Has Fallen

I gave this idea a trial run for the first time last year and, even though I am unable to judge the result with complete objectivity, I do not feel constrained from giving it another good shot here on this momentous occasion. Yes, it's a largely frivolous exercise, celebrating the changing of the calendar date--an arbitrary and artificial distinction, we can surely agree--but it seems to assuage something deep inside which calls for reflection of the old as well as anticipation of the new. And '08 was one whale of a year.

We're entering 2009 in the throes of the single most persuasive indication of Babylon's Fall it has been my misfortune to ever witness. Ever. Oh, I'd been predicting a coming financial crisis for some years; THIS went up at Daily Kos in April of 2005, but I have to admit I was unprepared for anything like a worldwide collapse; the dimensions of this disaster easily dwarf anything I was imagining. (And what happens when gasoline prices start heading for the stratosphere again??)

So let's take a few minutes here for some New Year's Ruminations...

Babylon Has Fallen

Brace yourselves, boys and girls. We're all about to get assaulted with a blast of senseless noise the like of which hasn't been heard since the end of the Bill Clinton presidency. The rabid, radical right is already stockpiling a fresh supply of vitriol and smear tactics, innuendo and rumor...all of which we'll be seeing, hearing and reading right after the Inauguration and for at least the next four years.

They lost big on Election Day, you see, and the Republican response to public rejection of their own failed policies is NEVER to retool and rethink; that's an option which simply doesn't occur to them. These people are the most rigid and inflexible sort of ideologues, already convinced of their own infallibility in spite of any amount of evidence to the contrary. Instead, their strategy will be just what it's always been: Lashing out with all the dirty accusations available to them, casting aspersions on Democrats' efforts and ideology. You can bet your last piaster that they'll be making our entire political discourse just as nasty and unpleasant as they know how.

And they've started in already...

Babylon Has Fallen

Right around two years ago, I wrote "Republican Death Rattle," followed by "Republican Death Rattle II" and then "GOP Graveyard 2006." Not long afterwards, the radical right had their applecart completely upset on Election Day in November of 2006 when Democrats re-took majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate...just as Howard Dean had brashly predicted almost a year earlier, in November of 2005.

That one felt better than Christmas.

Now, I'm no great shakes in the prediction department; my crystal ball is cracked, cloudy and overdue for a check-up, but sometimes things are obvious if you pay attention to the right clues. Don't listen to your crappy corporate media; their job is not to inform you and it NEVER has been. They've got a vested interest in convincing people that, with a little over a week until Election Day, there's an actual horse race going on here and it might even be neck-and-neck at the moment. Those hideously made-up hair puppets on the cable channels are doing their level best to remain relevant in the face of an unprecedented popular groundswell that renders them superfluous. Don't believe the hype: Barack Obama is going to be our next president, boys and girls, and we'll be marching into the future very shortly. You heard it here first...

Babylon Has Fallen

There's plenty of politics in the air today since Senator Obama turned in such a splendid performance in Friday night's first presidential debate, standing in stark contrast to a petulant, crabby old fart who would not even deign to look him in the eye. This capped off a crash-and-burn week for the radical right in general: Sarah-cuda Palin spouting unintelligible gibberish at Katie Couric, a supposedly suspended campaign...which was nothing of the sort, a GOP gridlock of the economic crisis talks in Washington and a confused and clueless lame duck president trying to pretend he still makes some small difference. No shortage of political topics at the moment.

But I want to talk right now about the passing of an old and dear friend whom I just never happened to meet. Paul Newman, icon of the silver screen, died on Friday, September 26, 2008 at his home in Westport, Connecticut after a protracted battle with lung cancer, at the age of 83. He is survived by his wife, Joanne Woodward, five children, two grandsons and his older brother, Arthur.

He enriched my life...

Babylon Has Fallen

There's plenty of politics in the air today since Senator Obama turned in such a splendid performance in Friday night's first presidential debate, standing in stark contrast to a petulant, crabby old fart who would not even deign to look him in the eye. This capped off a crash-and-burn week for the radical right in general: Sarah-cuda Palin spouting unintelligible gibberish at Katie Couric, a supposedly suspended campaign...which was nothing of the sort, a GOP gridlock of the economic crisis talks in Washington and a confused and clueless lame duck president trying to pretend he still makes some small difference. No shortage of political topics at the moment.

But I want to talk right now about the passing of an old and dear friend whom I just never happened to meet. Paul Newman, icon of the silver screen, died on Friday, September 26, 2008 at his home in Westport, Connecticut after a protracted battle with lung cancer, at the age of 83. He is survived by his wife, Joanne Woodward, five children, two grandsons and his older brother, Arthur.

He enriched my life...

Babylon Has Fallen

"Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states...and sometimes even psychosis."
--Albert Ellis, psychotherapist (1913-2007)

Focus On The Family is an evangelical non-profit organization founded in 1977 in Colorado Springs by self-appointed moral arbiter and general religious wackeroo, James Dobson. It should come as no surprise that mainstream medical, psychological, and mental health organizations have roundly criticized this group from a standpoint of ethics. Also, top academics have charged them with manipulating research in misleading ways. These lost souls are no doubt deserving of their own deconstruction here and I can promise they'll get one farther down the road...but they're not our primary target at the moment.

On July 30th of this year, Focus vomited out a video which featured Stuart Shepard exhorting supporters to petition God with abundant prayers so that Barack Obama’s Democratic Convention speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver would be washed out with “rains of biblical proportion.” No, I'm not kidding. Complaints from a portion of their own membership moved the group to pull the video and disable it. They also removed it from their archives, as well as from their GodTube and YouTube pages...but our crack celestial staff, working overtime, has located a copy for all of you stalwart readers. Good for a laugh because, as we all know, NOTHING occurred to interfere with Senator Obama's inspiring speech that night...and I'm certain these so-called Christians were beside themselves with frustration about it.

Here we have just one more incident which highlights a deeply disturbing trend emerging from the Fundamentalist Flying Monkeys of the far right. Meet me on the other side and I'll tell you all about it; you're not gonna believe THIS one...

Babylon Has Fallen

One of the things I have tried to avoid in my blogging is the topical, newsy slapdash post. Dependent as they are on the latest current events, such blog entries don't age well; they lose their context and relevance in a matter of weeks. Or even days. And I can't produce well under constrictive deadlines. I've said it before here, but since my work here has become more than a little sporadic of late, this surely bears repeating.

Also, there are some dynamite websites in the progressive blogosphere these days which fill that niche more than adequately. Talking Points Memo is probably our premiere straight news-gathering site, but The Brad Blog also does tremendous work in that area as does The Raw Story. (Big high-five to Larisa Alexandrovna; you can GET it, young lady!) For up-to-the-minute analysis, you can't do better than Crooks & Liars, ThinkProgress, Daily Kos, AMERICAblog, The Huffington Post and TruthDig. I cannot BEGIN to offer what dedicated folks like those can churn out with regularity.

But now, following a resplendent Democratic convention and preceding its questionable Republican counterpart doing an unsteady gavotte with Hurricane Gustav even as I type, I feel as if I have no choice but to ask: Is the GOP deliberately TRYING to lose in November??

Babylon Has Fallen

I hadn't been particularly inclined to resurrect the ol' FBB because our news has been so dismal and dire of late that frivolity just hasn't seemed appropriate. The immediate future, from all preliminary indications, is going to be traumatic and painful, chaotic and crazy-making; we appear to be smack dab in the middle of those "interesting times" threatened by that Chinese curse. Right here. Right now. There's some pretty serious stuff going down these days, folks, and it just isn't a laughing matter! Still, I've always liked the tabloid aspects of the Bulletin and our crack celestial staff has gathered up some scoops and scuttlebutt which simply don't seem to fit anywhere else...so here we go once again with what may be the clearest indications yet of ongoing decline for Babylon.

Babylon Has Fallen

AND SO IT BEGINS...

It has seemed to me for quite a long while now that continuing belief in the conservative ideology has certain inviolable prerequisites: A sketchy, limited knowledge of history, a lopsided view of economic causes and effects, a total inability to think abstractly, minimal perception of nuance, significant amounts of naked greed and implicit, child-like faith in unproven precepts. Tooth fairies, anyone?

Logic, reason and empirical evidence have NO place in their belief system. For heaven's sake, don't confuse them with the facts! They subscribe to a carefully wrought mythology--or at least they claim to!--and they haul it out of mothballs every time they are in any position to make governing decisions. It is unsurprising, then, that they are consistently wrong about the disasterous Real World consequences which inevitably follow. One would think that serial failure might lessen their support of this ridiculous dogma...or at least occasion some healthy skepticism.

Not on your tintype.

Babylon Has Fallen

Back in January of 2007, I posted "Language Pollution" here in which I attempted to get at the ways and means by which the right wing laid its foundations for the hysterical hatred and fear-mongering now the hallmark of our current, blighted administration. I would urge you to look it over. In the upcoming presidential campaign, we're going to be inundated with specious rhetoric duly polluted by Republican politicians and their tame media pundits. Believe it.

At the same time, keeping a fine, firm grip on the truth has probably never been more important in the history of this country. Over the last eight years, we have frittered away our best chances of coping with the big issues facing the survival of modern civilization and irrevocably diminished our possibility of containing them painlessly, distracted by deliberate rightwing lies and misdirection. Not to mention a criminal administration run completely amok.

Babylon Has Fallen

Back in January of 2007, I posted "Language Pollution" here in which I attempted to get at the ways and means by which the radical right laid its foundations for the hysterical hatred and fear-mongering which has become the hallmark of our current, blighted administration. I would urge you to look it over. In the upcoming presidential campaign, we're going to be inundated with specious rhetoric duly polluted by Republican politicians and their tame media pundits. Believe it. At the same time, keeping a fine, firm grip on the truth has probably never been more important in the history of this country. Over the last eight years, we have frittered away our best chances of coping with the big issues facing the survival of modern civilization and irrevocably diminished our possibility of containing them painlessly, distracted by deliberate rightwing lies and misdirection.