What Gives?

Inspired by a neighbor lady who debuted in her blog just today, I thought I'd do a rare thing and stop by my own site, for the first time in yet another long while, and immediately I saw one reason, though far from the only one, that's been inhibiting me from posting here lately.  

At some point I've been hit here by a virus or something, that causes weird strips of ads to appear suddenly on the page where posts are composed.

What to do about this?   I have no idea.   One thing I fear most is that if I did manage to post this message, that dumb ad that is obscuring the style line and that seems to be an ABC news ad might show up on my weblog page, too.

I decided first to check to see if the virus, or whatever it is, has infected just the one main computer, the "Little Black," that I use most in the house, or whether it's on either of the two in my workshop that can also go online.   And lo and behold there doesn't seem to be a problem on the main one here in my workshop, the "Aluminum." 

Meanwhile I would give a link to the neighbor lady's new site, but you know what they say -- "Discretion is the better part of valor."  (Do they still say that, and do I have it right?  More and more I feel like I'm gradually losing any handle that I may ever have had on what's what.   You know, the age thing, and all that goes with that.)   After all, I got the link from an email that L. had sent to all the ladies in her and my wife's book club, and so maybe it was intended only for their eyes.

   But meanwhile, welcome to the wide world of weblogging, L.  You've started yours in the same month that I did this one, way back in 2004.   And wow!   If my count is right, that means that my "Unpopular Ideas" is now nine years old!

There's so much you can find to write about on these things -- especially when you don't bother to post it.

Checking In

I haven't posted anything here (or anywhere else that I can remember) for over three months, not because I'm unwell....

Well, I AM a bit unwell.   I've had a tough winter, for an old guy of 81.   The nights and the early mornings -- the times when I am probably most up and about -- have been consistently too cold, even though the numerous storms have just as consistently brushed by this small part of the Mid-Atlantic states without doing nearly the heavy work that they have accomplished in many of the surrounding regions, especially the Northeast.

But that intense and lasting cold has been working hand in hand with my having slipped and fallen heavily on my back four times this winter -- three of those while going down sets of my outside stairs while it was raining, and once while going UP one of those same stairs while it was dry and sunny -- and all contributed to my upper back hurting in a number of different ways and at different times, and it still is a problem.

However, the main reason I haven't written anything here since Nov 25 is that I simply haven't felt like it, and that's the long and the short of it.

From my point of view, since the elections, these have been very uninspiring times.   The elections came out okay, and things would've been infinitely worse, had the Republicans won.  Nevertheless, there's been a general letdown to everything ever since.

What else can I say?

Well, I know there are many things I could say, but even today doesn't seem like a good day for it, even though today is the last day of February.

February was forecast to be unusually cold, and it was, at least around here.   The Spring that is almost upon us has been forecast to be unusually hot.

For a long time I've been hardly able to wait.  

The Real Horror of This Past November 6

 

The Republicans are horrified, or they profess to be.   They just can't understand how they were denied yet another shot at wrecking the U.S. economy, reviving Jim Crow days, and herding all the Latinos back to Mexico, and now they are as busy as can be, looking for those responsible for their rejection.  They are looking everywhere except where they should be directing their dumbfounded gazes  -- in a mirror.

--Except that that wouldn't help them either, because their mirrors are not silvered in the usual way, and instead the Regressicans tolerate having around only things that are fashioned to assure them of how necessary they are.

And regardless, the real horror of those elections is not in any way the fact that they lost.   Instead it's that they got as many votes as they did. The real horror and a very poor reflection on the U.S. as a whole is that the margin of Obama's victory was as close as the three or four million edge that he had in the popular vote, in a country of over 300 million, and his 106-vote edge in the electoral college.   The real horror is that the Republican Party is still taken that seriously by so many or by anyone at all, since during the campaign they didn't take one stand that wasn't egregiously, totally, manifestly and in every other way ill-considered, indecent, immoral, and just out and out wrong.  No, not one!

To amplify that point, here I could continue in thousands of different directions, though any one of those should be all that's needed at any one time, such as in a diary.   That small number is probably all that is behind most votes cast anyway.

For now, as we would at the outset of the first game in a World Series, let's look at the lineup that the Republicans used this year.   It was pretty paltry, I would say, not even worthy of being a contender in a kiddy league.   Having long since given dismissal notices to all the reasonable, feasible, halfway distinguished figures in their midst, left over from before the Tea Party boarding of the boat, the Repubs were left without any heavy hitters, as could easily be seen in the prospects that they tried out during their primaries.

 I mean the "Crazy Eight," or Seven, or however many there were at any one time, that consisted almost entirely of moral cripples, such as the pompous and abusive reject from yesteryear named Newt Gingrich, the walking, talking, padded shoulders dummy named Rick Perry, the odious Rich Santorum, the shrill and certifiably insane Michele Bachmann, and the repulsive carnival clown Herman Cain.  Ron Paul might have been a faint possibility, but he had shown some colors that just weren’t right, in his infamous newsletters of too short a while ago.  Have I left anyone out?   Oh yes,  The Romney guy, and now more is known about him than anyone would ever want to know.   And that left Jon Huntsman as their only prospect with anything near a Presidential air.  But because he had been Obama's ambassador to China, and because he was not toxic and nauseating like the other Republican contenders, he was roundly dismissed by the mean-spirited conservative audience whose votes they sought and by his presumed colleagues themselves.

And because that kind of caustican is therefore the only kind that is looked upon favorably by today's Repubs, to continue my baseball analogy, it's hard to see how there can be any better players anywhere on their farm teams that the Repubs can bring up for the next Presidential go-round, when they will be facing the by then well-rested and well-tested Mrs. Clinton, a woman with more smarts (and more experience already on the White House level) than any 10 candidates bound together with a Republican label.

This year in the lead-off spot the Repubs had for their Presidential contender a man who could have been seen as matching up with the evil-tempered, bigoted Ty Cobb of yore, famed for spraying more than his share of singles and doubles and in which he was greatly helped by his rep for using his spikes on anyone at hand while running the bases.  But in today's times, with all the fences having been pulled back considerably by any number of persistent problems, the Repubs are going to need someone more suited for the cleanup spot -- a far-sighted longball hitter -- and the carefully thinking and clear-eyed political Ted Williamses and Henry Aarons are just nowhere to be seen on today's or 2016's Republican rosters.  The attitudes of a party that would countenance seeing rape as being an "act of God" are a big turnoff to that kind of player.

  

The Big Republican Shell Game of the Last Half-Century

In a post in Hullabaloo, dated 14 Nov 2012, Dante Atkins outlined what he called "the Grand Lie."  It could also be called  the "Big Republican Strategy," though my favorite would be "the Great Republican Shell Game of the Last Half-Century."   Atkins related his summary purely to the national deficit, but I think it sums up with unusual succinctness, clarity, and accuracy the scam that the Republicans have managed to pull off  over and over again, ever since the Civil Rights laws were enacted and the Republicans began concurrently using the "Southern Strategy."

         Atkins saw the oft-repeated cycle as taking place in four stages in which the Repubs (in his words):

        1) Claim that jobs and economic growth depend on tax cuts, especially on the wealthy. Claim that any cuts will pay for themselves. Both of these are lies. . . .

        2) When revenues dwindle and deficits explode as they have under every Republican President since Nixon, blame "welfare" (a lie) and "spending" (another lie.)

        3) Let Democrats be the ones to take responsible measures to bring deficits back under control by sacrificing their own programs. . . .

        4) When good economic times and minor tax boosts bring both the economy back to health and the deficit back in line, tell people that the government has too much money, and that they should "get more of their money back." This is an intentional strategy to drive up the deficit, forcing more cuts later.

          I had been thinking along the same lines about matters in general, and I would've put it in a way that is  slightly different, because of a couple of added filips.

         I would've said that the Democrats bring on the good and charitable times, but then the Repubs use the only big idea that they ever have, tax cuts and more tax cuts, plus barely concealed attacks on those who are not likely to vote for them, to convince enough stupid,  greedy, and hate-ridden voters to put them in power.   Once in power the Repubs then run down the Government's bank account to almost nothing, by diverting as much as they can of the national treasury into the pockets of the monied class and by indulging in unnecessary wars and other adventures, while enacting laws and following policies designed to punish those who don't see things their way.
       That pushes the public into bringing back Democrats to pump the economy back up while setting aright  the many historical wrongs favored by the Repubs.   The Repubs then pull the wool over American eyes yet again, usually by playing their always dependable trump card, racism,  and  that whole process of Republican wrack and ruin and Democratic reconstruction unfolds all over again.   And it has stood the Repubs in good stead since the 1960's, notwithstanding the truism that whatever is good for them is invariably bad for the U.S. as a whole and for the planet.

Today we are in the middle of the latest Democratic rebuilding process, after the messes left behind by the most recent Repub President, GWBush.   Ordinarly the Repubs might've been more content to wait till there was more in the government coffers for them to loot, but then they let the spectacle of that "nigra in the White House" get the best of them.

Voting Democratic, With Love

A couple of notes, from the recent elections, in the Piedmont of Virginia:  

In this heavily rural area, the county where I live is, on the electoral map, almost always a lone little island of blue in a sea of Republican red, and that is interesting, since the population here is predominantly "white" by much the same large margins as in all the surrounding counties.   My theory is that this is because I, a transplant from always Democratic D.C., am here.   But there is also the fact that a lot of the so-called "white" folk here still fondly remember FDR and the New Deal days, as well as other government assistance, since economic conditions here have never been the best.  (And in 1969 Hurricane Camille hit this county with special ferocity, taking over 100 lives).  Furthermore,  this county has been unusually tolerant to the influx of a number of "come-heres" from other states -- hippies, back-to-the-landers, refugees from blighted New Jersey decades before Sandy, and others of that sort of the progressive inclination -- as contrasted to the "been heres."

A Democratic official who worked in the campaign office where my wife manned the phones, etc., also worked in an adjoining county which also had an Obama office, and to my surprise that county also went Democratic.   I had lumped that place in with all the adjoining red counties, especially because one of the state prisons is there.  But this director said that when they heard that there was such an office, so-called "black" people kept trooping in there bringing the campaign workers all kinds of food and helping in other ways.  They wanted to do all they could for the man they fondly called their "boy."   Most were quite elderly, which means that they, like me, had a lot of things to remember, and so my county this time had company amongst the blue, and that also included the much larger and more affluent county just to the north of here and that is home to the University of Virginia and various other intellectual industries.

(If you want to know, I try hard to avoid using those stark and stupid terms, "black" and "white," when applied to people.   I believe in the precise use of language, and in all my years I have never seen anyone the color of the inside of a stovepipe or of the newly fallen snow.   Even worse, those terms imply that the two groups are exact opposites, when actually nothing could be farther from the truth.   Having had the unusual privilege of having lived one half of my life in an almost completely "black" world and now the other half in a largely "white" one, I think I can say without any fear of refutation that man for man and woman for woman, the two groups are identical in all the ways that matter most, and that applies especially to a measurement much more important than the often cited intelligence quotients: their slob IQ's.

A second note: A lady friend of ours volunteered to drive to the polls anyone who needed a lift.   By election day, however, almost everyone on the somewhat long list that she was given had already gotten some transportation, save for an 85-year old "black" lady who was confined at home.

Our friend helped this lady get into the voting building and then to the voting table, for marking the paper ballots.   The elderly lady told our friend that, in addition to her other infirmities, she also couldn't see too good, and she asked to be shown where she could be sure of marking the name of her "boy."

When that was done, the old lady was not yet through.   She pointed her finger emphatically at the rest of the ballot and said, "Okay, honey.   Now show me the people that are going to help my boy."

A Day Like No Other!

Well, here it is at last, finally -- A DAY LIKE NO OTHER! -- in my lifetime, and I was around during the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor, as well as during thousands of other indignities imposed on the human spirit.

I am writing this early in the morning of Tuesday, November 6, of the year 2012, and it is incredible that in just a few more hours many millions of people throughout these United States of Ours will learn -- ALL AT THE SAME MOMENT!, thanks to the wonders of modern communication -- whether their intense labors of the past couple of years in a political cause all went for naught, or whether their efforts prevailed.   And a great deal more millions who stood by or sat pat and watched while their votes were so urgently being sought, will learn how what they took to be just a big horse race came out.

In just hours all Americans, along with the rest of the world -- which is holding its breath, and with good reason -- will learn how things will go with the United States, especially in the next four years but also for much longer.   Will the American voters choose to let the Republicans resume their drive to push the country deeper into the religio-fascism favored by past administrations and Congresses put into place by their party and that has already been painfully sloshing around the soles and heels of the country's feet for a good little while?   Or will the country gain a four-year respite and hopefully even a start of a reversal of that push, by choosing Democrats all the way down the line, or at least most of the way, headed by allowing B. Obama to serve a second term?

Or, on the third hand, will the results today end up temporarily hung up on the shenanigans of that same rogue party, the Republicans, to steal what they know they can't get legitimately, simply because their stands on every single issue are born solely out of ignorance and evil intentions instead of out of the charitable and sensible points of view held by the Democrats?  If so, the true results, centered around just a few states or just one, with the main possibility being Ohio but also including other so-called "swing" states like Florida and Virginia, may not be known for several weeks, which will give the Republicans time to wheel up the many conservative judges so as to render the kind of verdicts that resulted in the so-called "winner" 12 years ago, and we know how that all came out.   Not good.   Not good at all.   In fact disastrous for all except for racists, rapists, war criminals,  and those big money holders of the insidious and impenetrable side bets with names like "credit default swaps," whose implications are still not well understood by the great majority of people today.

But perhaps there have been enough people of good will and a sense of decency among Americans of all hues to go for Obama regardless of his several, hard to understand miscues every once in a while, and to vote for him in such numbers as to avoid all such skullduggery.   My wife, who has worked hard knocking on people's doors and doing all that kind of stuff, thinks there is no doubt whatsoever that that will happen, and I can't see how there can be any other choice, short of a scene dominated by insanity and criminality.

One thing is certain.  Not in my lifetime of over eight decades has so much been at stake on a single election day.

Will It or Won't it? "Sandy" I Mean

These are especially exciting times!   In less than two weeks two enormously important decisions will have been made, the first by voters in the American elections on November 6, and the other about a week earlier -- maybe just a day or two from now -- and that one will be made by an unusual convergence of different weather events over the ocean close to the East Coast of the U.S.

Sandy, sometimes a hurricane and sometimes a tropical storm, is chugging northward over the unusually warm and therefore storm-building waters of the Atlantic toward some point that will most likely be just offshore from New Jersey -- where else? -- upon which it will either turn left and head directly for the land, where it will meet up with a trough that is waiting for it and become hybridized into a third kind of storm that will create all sorts of havoc, or it will stay out at sea while only drenching a few places as a reminder of how once it passed by.

All the models created by supercomputers predict that the former will happen -- the left turn that will cause Sandy to hit Boswash head on with storm surges, high winds, knocked-down trees galore, power outages everywhere, floods, snow farther west, two weeks of ice cream that will suddenly have to be eaten in two days, and other disruptions aplenty -- the "Storm of the Century" some are predicting, while others say that it is just a modest forerunner of even worse to come, due to climate change.

That left turn is not unprecedented but it is unusual -- there have been a number of other named hurricanes this year about which nothing much has been heard, because they've all kept leaning to the right far out into the Atlantic where eventually they've fizzled away, so that in general, for humans if not for the fish, it's been a quiet hurricane season ...till now.

One of the main things I've been wondering is whether or not the Republicans have found a way to blame Sandy on President Obama.   There can be no doubt that they've been working hard on such a proposition, and it couldn't have helped their dispositions when Hurricane Isaac threatened to disrupt their convention in Tampa a few months ago.   This is certain because they've been so unstinting in blaming Obama for everything else that they can even remotely portray as being disastrous, not only under the Sun but also even under the most distant stars.

If Sandy lets itself be pulled harmlessly out over the ocean, the Republicans will loudly and uproariously give Romney all the credit, most likely by having stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty and blowing at the clouds.   If on the other hand Sandy turns westward and goes on to violate man's works bigtime, then they will trumpet it as being not at all the work of the jet stream but all Obama's doing instead, accomplished by his having directed his admirals in Norfolk to send all their ships out to sea, under the pretense of riding out the storm but really to get behind it and push it shoreward to do the deed.

And millions will believe them.  How rotted out on the inside by their own bile are many men today!   They all live under the elephant's rump.

(Posted on Daily Kos yesterday as my fourth diary there.  Changed this version slightly.)

Palin on Obama

After the third and last debate between President Obama and M. Romney this past Monday, which focused on foreign affairs and in which Obama is widely considered to have far outdone Romney, S. Palin is quoted as having tweet-tweeted this amazing example of numbskullery:

"I think President Obama certainly showed his desperation tonight with not only his mannerisms, with all of his interruptions and seemingly angered responses, but his false charges.  And he is trying to make up for lost ground, of course, because the president’s lies are catching up with him. It’s unfortunate that Gov. Romney didn’t have time to answer all the false charges. I made a couple of pages of a list of the false charges."

She certainly petted the wrong end of the horse on that one!

Palin has demonstrated over and over again that if anything, beyond shooting large, unarmed animals, she knows even less about basic subjects familiar to ordinary informed citizens, such as history, geography, and situations overseas, than even Romney does, beyond his country club and vulture capitalist circles of friends.

I would very much like to see that list of "false charges" compiled by the woman who claimed that Paul Revere made his famous ride to warn the British, not the American patriots.   So far, however, it doesn't seem to have escaped the privacy of her feverish little hands.   Or should I say her "Fox News rhetoric?"

How pitiful -- and also almost unbelievable -- it is to see a woman so admirably constructed, physically speaking, suffering so badly and all unawares from total mental and spiritual corruption.   Instead of showing her off so much, the Republicans should be sifwasped for what they have done to the former Ms Heath, by having showered her so liberally with fame, power, and money.   And she should be, too, for having swallowed so much of those grossnesses, whole hog.

About that Second Diary

After almost as much difficulty as I had with the first diary, in finding my way around Dkos's ways of doing things, I finally managed to post the second one there, about A. West, without any snags.

The main problem was that DKos shows two boxes where you can put your diary.   The first, smaller one is called the "Intro," and the second is called "Extended (optional.)"   Lacking any instruction to the contrary, when I was trying to post the first diary, the "Money Mooning" one, I assumed that the Intro was supposed to contain the first two or three paragraphs of the diary, while the Extended was for the rest.   But what happened was, first, that, probably because of my fumbling, only those three paragraphs that I put in there could be seen when it was published, while nothing of the rest of it ("Mooning" is on the longish side) appeared.

But it did appear that there was one comment, my own, in something called the "Tip Jar." and in the tip jar, which usually doesn't contain anything at all, was the whole diary, including those first three paragraphs.  That arrangement didn't strike me as being cool at all, but I didn't know what to do about it.   I couldn't even find out how to delete that diary so that I could start over.   I found instructions on how to, but it involved hitting buttons that were nowhere to be seen.

On top of that, after more fumbling, maybe by bringing up the whole diary anyway from that tip jar, "Mooning" appeared as hoped for, except that between the first three paragraphs and the rest was a large and unsightly gap.   Meanwhile the diary then did appear in Dkos's list of newly published diaries.   But, after only getting one comment, a favorable one, that mention of it disappeared along with everybody else's new ones, except the instant winners, as is the way of things, with dozens of new diaries there appearing every day.

But things went differently with this second one, mainly because I discovered that a whole diary could be stuffed into the Intro box.   And then, next, lo and behold, the next  night after I posted "Cash Cows," it was the second entry in a roundup of election-oriented diaries that appeared on DKos's very first page!   And along with that they had included the first 4 or 5 lines from the diary, with a couple of minor changes in what I had written.

However, it was late at night and I was so tired that I had no energy or the will to look into this further, and naturally a few hours later that version of the first page was long gone.   Things move very fast and fluidly at DKos, and you have to have a really bigtime diary for anything to stay visible there for long.   Maybe if I knew something about Lindsay Lohan or Kim Kardashian that nobody else knows.....  

Since then, however, I have seen nothing more of this second diary either, by not yet having mastered the art of navigating through the site.  But I did see, in one place, that it had gotten 3 comments, and in another that it had gotten the much-prized "recs" from 5 people, which doesn't quite line up, but never mind.   I am happy with that, and maybe later I'll try to see if I can find how many comments were really made and what they were.

These things take time, you know.

Second Diary

. . .And here is the second diary that I posted on Daily Kos, just a few days ago.  With quite a few changes it was originally the second half of the other post about West that I published here two or three weeks ago.

The Cash Cows of Allen West

by Sofarsogoo

Allen West (Ahrah of Fla) is enraged.   After all the hard and unflagging work he has put into becoming one of the biggest topsails of the super-remunerative hate industry, and in record time, according to Politico he has been shortchanged on the amount of  the proceeds that have been solicited and received in his name.   In fact he could even be angrier at the scam pacs and what-not that are supposed to be supporting him but are instead stuffing their own pockets with a large part of all the $25 and $50 donations, than he is at the Sun, the Moon, goldfinches, and everything else that is good and decent in the world.

Too bad.   It couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right?   And guess what?   To call these outfits to account he has complained to the FEC, the Federal Election Commission.   Isn't that a part of the Government that he would nevertheless like to cut down in size to nothing more than a cash box for the war industry? -- that same government that is also still handing out to him benefits that in a just world would have been denied to him because of his bad behavior while he was in the military.

But West need not be dismayed.   Racial hatred, as it has been so stirred up into sight from America's lowest depths by the Repubs in the current election, has created more cash cows than they can shake their stick at, so that West has as many resources at his disposal as any blackguard could ever want.   He need only snarl.

If the main reason that the Republicans and their admirers are so hell-bent on disposing of B. Obama is not really because of his domestic record and is not really because of his foreign policy and is not really because he has evaded their blind bull rushes with all the grace and dexterity of a skilled matador, but is instead mainly because of his skin color, coupled with the failure of the U.S. to go to the dogs during his presidency despite all their best efforts to see to that, it could be that by now the Repubs have started wondering if it's not too late to focus on  saving A. West with the same intensity that they have spent on trying to unseat Obama.

I don't know how the polls are going in West's try for another shot at poisoning the national well.   As of a couple of days ago, if you googled that, you would get a jumble of reports like nothing you've ever seen, half saying that West is ahead of his opponent, Patrick Murphy, by something between 9 and 14 points, while the other half will claim that Murphy is ahead by exactly the same huge margin.  Whatever the case, West has been the very model of the bugaboo that the Republicans always like to trot out when they are in need of fresh material with which they can humiliate rainbows (i.e, "black people" in my language if not in yours, and never mind the gays -- American so-called "black" people sport all the colors of the human spectrum) in the Repubs' all consuming drive to shove rainbows and all other visible minorities back into the inferiority cage and this time lock the door for good.

This practice started when the Repubs, along with some badly misguided Democrats, foisted the supremely unqualified Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, where, as they hoped, he has been nothing more than a dark lump of mute, petrified wood.   And as there is never a shortage of such rainbow opportunists, because the pay is so good, Thomas was soon followed by people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who, as a result of the affiliation they chose, are lucky that they, along with GWBush, aren't sitting up in the Hague right now, defendants in a mass trial for war crimes, because of Iraq.

   In the Far Right's eyes, A. West has done a heck of a job, he really has, and so we should not be surprised if very soon now -- if they haven't already -- the Repubs will start thinking that maybe just a few tens of millions of those dollars intended for the two "R" boys would be just as well spent on trying to buy West’s re-election, since the spectacle that he has made of himself so starkly and truly facilitates the One Big Thing that feeds all their criminality during this election, and that is racial hatred.

That Diary

Here, for the record, is the diary that I posted on DKos a couple of days ago, or rather that I seem to have thrown down a hole of total oblivion.   Nevertheless I still think it's accurate and that it says things that were worth saying.  I believe that, even as I post this here, the second debate has just finished, and quite possibly Obama performed much closer to everybody's specifications.

Money's Mooning of America  

   I don't get it.   Seemingly everyone and his brother, as if having drunk out of the same Rev. Jimmy Jones-type Kool-Aid trough, is saying that M. Romney won that first debate against B. Obama, and by a lot.   Even people who will then turn around and speak about all the misleadings (less courteously called "lies") in which Romney engaged, will look up from the trough and blithely and blindly make that assertion of his "victory" and then go on and on about Obama's "failure" as if there can never be any doubt about it, thereby giving new meaning to the old saying, "With friends like this, etc."

      You will rarely hear those people saying why Obama's "failure" should be so, other than stuff such as he was "passive," and he kept his eyes directed downward too much.   What on that stage was so splendid that it merited the President's steady attention?   Surely not M. Romney's strangely glossy, red-eyed, blustering aspect.   But the most common criticism is that the President failed to do what they, his attackers, say they would have done, in his place.
     That strikes me as being a very simple-minded and even dangerous line of attack, first because none of them are anywhere near being in his shoes and can't really know what it's like.  Also none of them have managed to accomplish anything near the incredible miracle that this man managed to pull off a few years ago and that was completely unprecedented in American history, namely managing not only to be elected the U.S. President, an accomplishment so rare that only about a dozen men ever get to occupy that office during the average American's lifetime, but also doing so while being that otherwise most hideous of beings, a male nigra!  Gott im Himmel!
       So I would think that, as uncomfortable as many Americans are with giving a man of color credit for having any smarts at all, no matter who he is, B. Obama's ways of conducting himself and his tactics should always be given great respect and a lot of pause, as unfathomable as they may be at times.   He has the successes to demand that.   From Day Before One he has had to fight hard just about every day and also almost single-handedly it sometimes seemed (going by the scarcity of reports about what his allies were doing, compared to how often you heard about him), against an army of Repubs, all aching to bring him down no matter what the cost to the country's well-being.   Yet he and the country are still very much afloat.   --Such a man should never be sold short.
     This widespread complicity in buying the ridiculous reminds me of what you hear all the time about bombing Iran.   Even those who are against that idea will still support other measures to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but seldom if ever will they give even a halfway reasonable justification for why that needs doing..    And do you know why?   It's because no such justification exists.
     Iran is a sovereign nation, just like Britain, the U.S., or Israel, only with considerably less blood on its hands -- scarcely any, in fact, relatively speaking -- and there is no good reason why Iran shouldn't be left alone to do whatever they please and can manage, to defend themselves.   And with someone like B. Netanyahu running around loose in its neighborhood like a raving, yapping pit bull, Iran definitely needs some nukes, for their normal and only feasible use -- the  beating of the national chest, gorilla-style.
     Meanwhile the three nations that I just mentioned have long had nuclear weapons coming out of their ears, yet they have the effrontery to tell Iran, a nation of 68,000,000 normal, dues-paying, hard-working people, nearly nine times as many as Israel can boast and about as many as Britain, not to mention much more contiguous territory and that most valued of all natural resources, oil, that it can't have any such lethal goodies.   And almost never does anyone question those powers about this all too obvious hyoocrisy.   Instead people just follow the "party" line, or what could better be called, the "thoughtless line."
      We can see the same thing at work in the chatter about that first debate.    Maybe those who haven't really thought about this and have accepted that verdict that Romney won and Obama lost as good coin are going by the principle that the popular perception is that Romney won because he was loud and assertive, and Obama was neither, and so the "Presidential disaster" bit must be true.   But my question is, how can it be true?   By what standards is Romney perceived as having outdone Obama?  On what basis are the winners and losers of debates even determined?   How are the points counted and what are they?
     Debates are highly subjective things.  The final verdicts on them are just matters of opinion and little else.   No matter how the media would have it, debates are not like contests such as basketball, football, or baseball, where you end up with baskets, touchdowns, or runs that can be tallied.  Debates are not even like their closer relatives, chess and prizefighting.   In chess the winner is very clear.   It's the player who has forced his opponent's king into a position where that king is in check and it can't get out of check.   In prizefighting, where the pugilists openly go for inflicting maximum physical damage, admittedly things get no better than in debates on those unsatisfactory occasions when so little damage has been inflicted that the winner has to be determined by referees and judges instead of by the ways for which that bogus "sport" is most often loved and revered -- a knockout punch or an opponent so battered and bleeding that he can no longer get back off the floor or the ropes.
      By contrast Obama ended up far from being unable to move out of check or to get off the canvas or the ropes (that he was never on to start with).   Instead the very next day, visibly unbattered and not bleeding in any way, he made a magnificent speech in Denver just as if he had never been anywhere near the likes of M. Romney in that same city the night before.   And the next day 30,000 admirers flooded a campus in Wisconsin, with more thousands in the outlying areas, to hear him speak, and the day after that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national unemployment percentage had dropped to 7.8, its lowest number since the newly inaugurated Obama was obliged to begin his term in office by trying to do away with  the enormous economic quagmire that had been left to him by the Republicans.   Yet now, not even four years later, far too many Americans, out of little more than undying resentment of his skin color, are ready and willing to let that same party take right back over again, even though GOPers created that mess in the first place and thereafter bitterly resisted every measure that Obama tried to take to turn things in better directions.
      If nothing will do nevertheless than having a scoreboard and tallying something,  then merely the number of lies told by the two sides should be as good a basis as any for saying who wins a debate, and I think you will find any number of articles enumerating Romney's lies, while there are few if any mentions of falsehoods told by Obama.   In fact, in this respect Romney can be thought of as having at least performed a valuable service, by making his lies so numerous, egregious, and easy to spot.   That would settle the question of who won or lost this debate right there, and the winner wouldn't be Rmoney, by a truly lopsided margin.
      But if that is conveniently set aside to keep the popular fallacy, the hoodwinking, and the lemming march going, then the standard must instead be the amount of wolfing that was done.   But is that what a political debate is supposed to be, especially in a Presidential race?   A wolfing contest, with the winner determined by seeing which contestant dished out the most bullpoop in a limited amount of time, a tactic also known as doing the "Gish Gallop?"   Then by that criteria Romney surely won.  But in that case it wouldn't have been a debate at all, that is, a contest of ideas and facts, but instead would be only a one-sided shouting match or a poop-shoveling competition,  with Romney's bullpoop having been by far the most toxic and noxious because it was so soaked with falsehoods, aka lies.
      The standard that I like most, however, and the one that I would think would be the most important when you are choosing a U.S.  President, because it pertains to so many matters,  is which person would you prefer having access to the likes of the famous nuclear "suitcase?"   Which person takes time to look  before he leaps?   Which person has a better feeling for the world beyond his several houses, his boats, his car elevators, and his huge bank accounts?
      During any big emergency, not just of nuclear war but also of any disaster that calls for Presidential leadership and assistance, would you want that leader to be cool, calm, and unflappable, as Obama has demonstrated time and time again that he surely is?   Or would you prefer the person who shows up at a mere debate so intent on deluding people with an impression of his being the one with the biggest stick, that his appearance and behavior suggest that he dropped something potent on his way there, and who comes across as being extremely hyper, with his performance consisting mainly of torrents of verbiage delivered with little or no semblance of careful, consistent thought behind them.   And Romney ended up descending to being absolutely picayune and mean-spirited when, after having a few months earlier said that he likes to fire people, he threatened the moderator of this debate, the venerable Jim Lehrer, with termination, by being unable to resist sounding an old Republican war cry that in this case was the same as saying, Oh, and by the way, Jim ol' snort, I will make sure that the U.S. government will no longer give funding to one of the country's finest cultural achievements, your PBS.   I want to give that drop-in-a-bucket money to my people instead, the already filthy rich.   They might not need it in the least, but they definitely want it, and that's all that matters, at least to me.
       Romney's general demeanor was the clincher for my contention that he, not Obama, was the big loser in their first debate, in more ways than one.   He resorted to schoolyard-type bullying, complete with cutting off Obama several times and Jim Lehrer repeatedly, as if he himself, the big cheese on that stage, was setting the rules for the occasion then and there.  (He must've struggled mightily to avoid calling the President "Boy.")   But maybe this is why so much of a nation that takes such great pride in being the one so-called "superpower" and therefore superior to all others in the world thinks that Romney won.  Haven't they heard of the dangers of hubris, or overweening pride?   But I guess not many Americans take Classics or the Humanities in college  though that should be required reading everywhere.   Believe it or not, the Greeks figured all this out as many as 3,000 years ago, yet today here we are, with people going for that same old disastrous red-eyed dodge yet again, the same as in countless times in the past and in countless places around the world.
      All that I could observe Romney accomplishing during those sad two hours is that, figuratively speaking, he exposed the vast expanse of his behind, by sticking it out a window of his blood-red bus and thereby mooning the country that he nevertheless thinks is obliged to choose him in less than a month from now as its next chief executive.
     If people do not know when they're being mooned, or if they enjoy being subjected to an experience like that, it's time for them to take some long walks through the woods and get themselves together, right now, while swearing off the "Kick Ass Joy Juice."
    (I apologize for the length of this diary, if you got this far, but that is what happens when you make a person wait for a week before he can post his first diary ever, as this one is.  :)  )

Okay. Did it.

I did it!   Tonight, at just about midnight on either the 14th or the 15th, I finally got myself together and I hit the Publish button, and now my first diary is out there, somewhere, on the Daily Kos.   And it is still titled "Money's Mooning of America," under the name that I use here, Sofarsogoo.   They said it's published to a new blog that I seem to have gotten there just by becoming a member, and I gave that one of my old trivia-playing names of years ago, Elderly Child.

The diary is on the longish side, and not just because I had to wait a week between becoming a DKos member and being able to publish a diary, during which time, naturally I thought of more things to add or to change.

I hope I didn't get too many facts -- or any -- wrong.   I kept trying to think of what could be wrong.   Anyway, it is more my usual side-off-the-wall and somewhat strong opinions anyway, than it is anything else.

Update: Three hours later the diary got its first comment, a favorable one! 

Meanwhile my mind, which never gives me a break at times such as this, keeps reading and re-reading the thing, trying to make sure it's still okay.

I guess this means that I'll be spending the rest of today dropping in there every once in a while, to see if anybody else read it and had something to say.   

My First "Diary"

On discovering that I could not post a comment on Daily Kos without being a member, four or five days ago I joined that site, mostly because I also had in mind posting some "diaries" there, including one in particular. But after I joined I then found that I could only post my first diary after a one-week waiting period.  That period should be over in another day or two, and then I will have to cross another Rubicon of sorts.

I said "another" because actually I've had quite a lot of these moments.  Even I am surprised at how many there've been, on my particular scale of things.

Quite naturally that first diary will be a shot at the biggest threat facing the U.S. today: the candidate for President named M. Romney. I've been through several titles for it. The first was "M. Romney's Mooning of America," but then I saw that DKos does not allow titles of "an inflammatory nature." So I changed it to "The Mooning of America." That was okay for a while, but another came to mind that I like even more, and I think I've decided to go with it.  It is "Money's Mooning of America." In progressive circles Romney's name is often spelled "Rmoney," for obvious reasons.  That shouldn't set too many big britches on fire, at least at first.  A little later it will be too late.

Other DKos diarists though not a lot have already covered the same ground as mine, but I figure you can't have too many on that theme, and also I take a slightly different and somewhat more detailed approach.   The theme is that Obama, not Romney, was the "winner" pf their debate last week -- if any debates can be said to have true winners, which I question, seeing that as a matter of a test of faith more than anything else.

I don't know how I'm going to fare with this diary business, because of the comments thing.   I've noticed that Dkos diaries, even those by newcomers, attract a lot of them, a huge lot, again on my scale of things.  Twenty or thirty are not unusual, and mine might draw that many or even more, seeing as how the stand I take is not a popular one and so could be a good target for quick, cheap shots.

Even Obama himself has bowed to the popular perception a little, by saying that he might have tried too hard to be "nice."   That could be seen as having punctured my case ahead of time, a little, but again I don't see things that way.   It wasn't Obama's behavior in the debate that concerned me.  From where I stand, it was Romney's conduct that made him the loser, by far.

I don't know how I would handle a situation that got anywhere near that many comments, because I've been spoiled by so many years of comfortably writing this one, which hardly anyone knows even exists. I have made a virtue of total obscurity, not only in this weblog but also in the way that I have led my entire life, and it's not easy to release one's grip on that kind of complete freedom. 

 

The biggest question, though, is not how many comments my diary will get.  It is instead what will I do if more than one comes my way.  My extreme distaste for confrontations of all kinds always causes me, in my own commenting, to post one and then go on off, usually without returning to see whether or not it got any reaction.   Though the other day I definitely did try to return to one place, with verbal mayhem in my heart.  But try as I might I didn't have a clear memory as to where I had put it, and I never did find the spot.   So the pompous dummy who set himself up so badly by stating baldly that Richard Nixon did more for civil rights than any other politician he could think of has been left to wend his merry way through his ignorance without being challenged, at least by me.

That experience very well could have built up my resolve to go ahead with this diary.

I have noticed that some diarists at DKos don't take part in the comments either, but others stay there and defend their views point by point. I can't see how either approach is that much superior to the other one, and so I tell myself that it won't matter.

Email to Bartcop

Below is a comment that I just sent off to Bartcop, an interesting and rambunctious entity and site that I've been reading since long before I got a weblog myself and that's  been 8 years already.   He just might print it on his site somewhere or put a link to it.  He likes showing emails critical of him.   He was so livid about Obama's conduct in the debate that he could barely control himself.   But then, though he is almost always on the decent side of matters, he suffers from the impulse to kick Democrats every chance he gets, and I just thought that, right now at least, he should know better.

With a bunch of changes, I could've sent off this same message to others who in my opinion should also know better, including the Pitt guy at Alternet, but I don't feel like it.  And anyway, it all seems so obvious to me.   As so often, I just don't understand how the differences in perception can be so stark!


Sorry, Bart, but in your zeal to pin petticoats on Democrats, one of your favorite activities, next to drinking Chinaco and playing Texas hold-up, which I think I can say as one of your regular readers over quite a few years, you have once again grabbed the sow by the wrong teat by so roundly condemning Obama here.

In so doing, in the midst of your many right-on-the-mark verdicts, here you have joined with a vengeance all the dummies who have been so ignorant of the importance of never rushing to make snap judgments -- or paying attention to snap polls  -- instead of waiting a few days to see which way the wind is blowing, and also for your mind to snap back to a more sensible shape.

Right now, a little over two days later, what I see are strong indications that Obama is coming out of this smelling pretty rosy.   So far what little we see of the polls indicates that he isn't any worse off now than he was before.  In fact he could be better off.   He is still drawing huge crowds with much more faith -- and good judgment -- than you're showing (did you see the picture of those 30,000+ that swarmed to see him in Wisconsin?), the unemployment sank to 7.8, Romney mainly showed his behind in the debates by his feverish and schoolyard bully behavior that couldn't have sat at all well with that biggest proportion of the electorate, the ladies, the biggest buzz that is going around is about all the lies he told, and above all, Big Bird, Kermit, Oscar, and all the others are on his case!

Maybe you need to get out of the mind-blipping air of Oklahoma worse than you think.   Meanwhile you also need to drop the dumb poker and instead start playing the game that really sharpens the mind, my game, chess, though, if you insist on coming out with lapses like this anti-Obama garbage, it's too late.
      --Carl, aka Sofarsogoo

Uh-Hunh

Attribution: unknown