November 11th

 Absent Friends

You know who they are.  

And none of us went to Southeast Asia for this shit.

Mozart: Concerto For Clarinet and Orchestra; 2nd Movement, Adiago

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Sag' Mir Nicht Adieu; Sag' Nur Auf Wiederseh'n

It's A Crool World
Welcome To Your Post-Electoral America

Tree Roots, Vincent Van Gogh's Last Painting; July 27, 1890

Not A GBCW

I'm considering ending this Blog, partly in reaction to what has just happened -- but also because there's nothing worse than a creative effort which, ultimately, is little better than what that cat shit person shovels into the digital universe.

I've been posting for 16 years, "masquerading as a Medium-Sized White Dog". It's provided an outlet for aspects of myself -- mostly, not that positive -- and releasing a large amount of sarcasm and anger all had some direct benefit for me, but not necessarily for any readers. I've dropped 1,257 posts over those sixteen years, but -- small wonder -- few people have read Before Nine, and few people follow it. No sour grapes; that's just how it is.

Most of those posts have been doomscrolling. I'm not an original thinker; I know facts, but in context of being a writer or social observer, I don't analyze them well.  Before Nine never had a wide readership, never moved opinions, or educated, or persuaded; I don't know what other result I could have been expecting: If you make cookies that taste like cardboard, no one wants to eat them.

Recently, I deactivated my Twitter account. It served much the same purpose as this blog, on a daily basis. I hated what Musk did to the platform; I hated his reinstatement of users who were effectively nazis; his opinions and behavior are personally repugnant. When he announced Twitter would eliminate the Blocking function (making it easier for Rightist crazies, scammers, and some persons with real pathological intent to stalk and harass others) that was all the motivation I needed to leave.

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Half of the United States electorate just shouted, " Ja ! Ein Volk, Ein Reich; Ein Fuhrer! " They have said, We want Fascism. Unfortunately, 'democracy' worked -- very unfortunately for migrants, People of Color; gay and transgender persons; women; liberals; the elderly; children. If you have been a vocal, visible critic working against That Person, writing and posting and speaking -- were I you, I'd leave the U.S. for relative safety abroad.

Also, it will be very unfortunate for Ukrainians, Taiwanese, the Baltic States, the EU and collective European security; Japan, South Korea, AUS, NZ, and the Pacific Basin.  Unfortunate for Palestinians, for Israelis. It will be unfortunate, eventually, for France, Germany; for any country whose nationalist political parties are hungering to seize power -- now bolstered and energized by That Person's election.

A majority of adult voters in America want That Person in power. They voted for Project 2025. They voted for everything that's about to happen. They voted in favor of lies, violence, and corruption, and I am trying without much success to comprehend it.

A general election in 1932 in Germany resulted in gains for the nazis and the KPD (German Communist Party). Any coalition government had to include both. The nazis maneuvered in the background for months, until Center parties and Rightist parties in Parliament agreed: Hitler could be appointed Chancellor, in January, 1933. He could be managed, controlled. We know the rest of the story.

Now, we've had our election. That Person has been elected president. I fully expect the next 24 months to seem much like the story of 1933 (only That Person may no longer be president -- I expect J. D. Vance, courtesy of the 25th Amendment). America will be run for the benefit of our Oligarchs and old-money Wealthy; and fuck the Peasantry.

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There will be no resistance; no unravelling of the fascists and theocratists; no calling the fascists to account. No justice. No major media, revealing events. There will be some marching, protesting, but America -- the one I grew up in, served -- is done. January of 2025 is a red line -- and once crossed, the America that exists now, right now, will never come again. 

I can offer my own opinions; but there are better thinkers, writers, observers, than I am. My points of view are similar to some, but not adding anything positive to the sum of human experience in this blog. There don't seem to be reasons to continue -- I haven't decided; not yet. Some of that dithering is simply technical.

According to The Great Curmudgeon, there is an internet tradition known as the Good-Bye Cruel World post (GCBW), where a content creator (nominally, a keyboard warrior type, like the cat shit person) writes a swan song of criticism and grievances, full of acid and bad language -- why not; you're jumping off the ledge, right? -- to explain why they're leaving.

This is not one of those; not really -- but, we're all living in Interregnum America.

Be kind, and be well.

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Auf Nicht Wiedersehen

Ende: Slipping Anchor

"First and foremost, I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest audience possible so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” Then he added -- as if he had to after a rare moment of honesty -- "But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."

John McManus, "The Flap Over Limbaugh", New American, April 2009

   

Lard Boy, 70, racist homophobic misogynistic junkie and self-described shill "intellectual engine" for America's Rightist movement, is dead. He was famous for publicly stoking political and racial hatred, spreading lies, and behaving like a high school bully for nearly thirty years. 

He was the most successful hate-monger on radio, after the end of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1984. Limbaugh used his huge soapbox -- not to build positive connections between people in service of a public good, but to pour permeating, corrosive dialogue into the culture.

Beginning in 1988, Limbaugh helped to shape the audience for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which debuted in 1996. Lil' Rupert could not have been as successful, quickly, without Limbaugh creating a ready-made market for the hatred and lies the Murdochs push daily.

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

He mocked people, insulted them, belittled them on air.  And from that soapbox, he lied, or passed along lies pushed by others. He used his position to attack public figures whose politics he disliked (even other conservatives who weren't Toeing the Limbaugh line), which would guarantee they received more hate mail and threats to their personal safety. 

He reveled and took pleasure in being able to affect others in a negative way from the safe remove of a broadcast studio, like the bully he was.

To an African American female caller: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back”.  To an immigrant:  “You’re a foreigner. You shut your mouth or you get out.”

Limbaugh was vain, morally and ethically crippled. He was a coward. His legacy is utterly negative, without a shred of redeeming behavior. And he was no stranger to flirting with sedition, even secession.

   

This government is governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government. Limbaugh; January 9, 2010

 

Blimp's End: 'Tucked In With A Spade' ; the obituary in Little Rupert's papers

("Giant Of The Age Passes - And The World Mourns").

He's dead. He was who and what he was. He was responsible for what he did.  I am not unhappy he's gone. If that's upsetting to you, so be it.

---

Reprint Heaven: After You've Gone, Again

 America, Redux: A Long Rant

(This, from July 2016, after the [then] Republican National Convention where The Leader declared he would accept the party's nomination ["Aw shucks; well, if you really want me"]. 

(Looking back through the lens of the election year, of Covid, of Black Lives Matter; America is no less divided. This is not over. Remember: millions of people are praying, fervently, that you and all those you know and love, should die. 

(And if someone appears with that message [delivered in wink wink language, but a clear message nonetheless], they would cheer and praise and follow. Remember that.)

Cleaning Up After Cleveland (Andreas Kudacki, July 22, 2016; nymag.com)

The Republicans have left Cleveland. There's little doubt that can-do Managers, the Owners and Choosers and Deciders, and the Belivers, were in control at the RNC, as they seem to be in control in so many places in our culture. Because Life is for The Strong, and the Tough, and the Competitive.  And those with The Faith.

You Worker Bees, you "individual contributors" will just have to pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps. We will be Great again, and have Law and Order -- here in Merica -- or, you know, not. Thank everyone for coming! 

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Two Tales Of The City

Yesterday, I exited a subway car heading home from work at rush hour, turned right, and walked up a crowded concourse. There was a wall to my immediate left and knots of other exiting passengers to my right. Suddenly, I was face to face with a Caucasian male in his mid-20's, tall -- I'm well over six feet; this guy was at least three inches taller -- thin, hair cut close on the sides and in the middle puffed up in a modified Mohawk strip (as if he had, uh, a Weasel On His Head).

What followed was textbook; each movement was an escalation. First, we looked -- no, we stared --at each other. Neither of us gave way. Even though by then there was plenty of room around us, we each moved forward and slid past each other, equally determined not to make it simple and as if daring the other party to ratchet things up. Our arms inevitably brushed against each other, and we both pulled them away like yanking off a band-aid. 

I had walked a step or two, and turned; he was already walking back. I stood where I was; he stopped inches from me. "You want some?" he said. I was surprised, but not that much; I was aware that ratcheting up the confrontation was my fault as well as his: They fought so fiercely because the stakes were so small. So, here we were and Quo Vadis?

Over the next second or so, I had two trains of thought. The first was something from another job life -- when an altercation turns into a confrontation, and the next step is physical violence, that's not optimal. Keeping public order means, even if you have a disregard for your own well-being, other people, innocent people, can get hurt. Your Macho takes a back seat.

The other consideration was -- this Guy. It was clear he was willing to make a physical threat to a complete stranger, standing on a public transport platform during rush hour and In These Times, when there are transit system police around -- I'd seen a K-9 patrol up ahead a few seconds before. I looked at the Guy, careful not to lean forward or move my hands, and made an Are you fucking kidding me? face. "Really?" I asked him.

"Really," he said -- and leaned forward. Without moving, I said, "Excuse Me."  Leaning forward a bit more, determined to count coup, he said, "Excuse me. Have a nice day." Even without hearing his tone of voice, you can decide whether or not he meant it.

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Fast forward to this afternoon: A bus in Kiddietown; another Caucasian guy in his twenties -- this one short and slight, casually dressed, otherwise unremarkable -- drops a few papers as he enters the bus, and begins cursing -- shouting, in fact; and it's quickly clear he's inordinately upset about something which does not involve the bus, or anyone on it.

He stomps toward the back of the bus, drops into a seat, and for the next block or so periodically shouts more curses, slapping the seat beside him. Almost everyone else on the bus goes into You Are A Nutter And We Will Now Ignore You mode -- but, The Guy gets into it verbally with two Black males sitting behind him. Predictably, it escalates quickly.

"Hey!" Says the first man to The Guy, "Leave me alone. Shutthefuck up, man!"  "Fuck you man!!" shouts The Guy. "I'll kick your fuckin' ass!!" The second man, who has a voice like James Earl Jones and is happy to project it, joins in: "Hey; I ain't takin' that fuckin' bullshit off you, so just shut - the - fuck - up!!"

The Guy braces himself in his seat and, with a real sense of timing, waits for a beat and then leans forward, staring at the two men, his face distorted with rage. "Fuck you!!" he shouts, then adds, "You, you -- N_____ !!"

A hush falls over the entire bus, more felt than heard -- because He said the N-word to two Black guys and we live in post Furgeson-Cleveland-Baltimore-Chicago-Mineapolis-et al. America -- and I'm thinking: man, wasn't I just here yesterday?

Meanwhile, the James Earl Jones Soundalike both increases the volume and lowers the pitch of his voice to a growl, another textbook stop on the road to This Is Really Fucked Up. The Guy keeps shouting, a slight hesitancy in his voice now, as if understanding he'd crossed The Fabled Line when using the n-word a block or so back. The two Black guys keep raising their voices in response.

Obligatory Mongo Photo In Middle Of Blog Terror

It's clear the confrontation has reached a binary decision point, and several other passengers call out to the driver, a Latino with a wrestler's build wearing Ray-Bans, to "do something".  He doesn't, right away; I understand -- 1.) Things can happen, all of them unpleasant by degrees; 2.) His Management supervisor and Union Foreman have advised there are liability issues; and  3.) "They don't pay me enough for this shit, dude".

The driver finally comes to an official bus stop, halts the vehicle, then stands up, leans on a nearby pole and looks toward the altercation (all non-threatening, casual). "Hey -- hey; take it outside," he says to no one in particular, then appeals to reason and some generally-accepted social propriety: "Not on the bus, man."

After a few seconds, when things could have gone in any direction, The Guy stands up and exits by the side door, shouting insults at the other men all the way. The men return them -- but it's all textbook now; The Guy has been the one to retreat.

Once he's off and the doors close, the bus begins to pull away. As it does, from the relative safety of Outside, The Guy performs another textbook maneuver: he begins screaming, ratcheting up his invective ("Fuck you! N_____!! You N_____!!") and slaps the side of the bus.  JEJ-2, looking through the bus windows, grins and flips him off; The Guy seems even more enraged and escalates again ("I'll kill you, N_____ motherfucker!!"), but it's all for show, now, and everyone knows it. JEJ-2 grins once more and shouts, "Yeah; talk on, fuckhead"-- counting coup, also textbook.

A woman in her twenties at the front of the bus, holding a Prada purse and wearing a print sun dress, a Rolex and her own Ray-Bans, looked around at the other passengers and said with a giggle, "Well, that was rully intense!" The remainder of the ride, by comparison, was uneventful.

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The Brand, As If Anyone Had Forgotten

(Carolyn Kaster / AP; The Atlantic online)

Jocks And Mean Girls Rule

So why mention these things? (Dogs like stories, and are good at the details.)  Because they exemplify a miserable trend in the broader culture; because I can't remember the last time I was in a confrontation (even one I helped create), as a civilian, which had real potential to become physically violent. And some of it mirrors what was on stage in Cleveland.

I'm part of an American demographic that doesn't encounter much real violence or intimidation, or police activity, on a regular basis. Mentioning my experiences to my friends prompted their own stories of confrontation and escalation. The general consensus:  these altercations seem to happen more frequently, now --- and, they've increased over at least the past decade.

Most often, they happen when driving, shopping, and (bingo) commuting on mass transit. However, the most disturbing aspect to my friends is how easily things escalate: people seem more willing to push situations, which could easily be walked away from, right to the brink where real violence is possible.

Official studies show the same trends, nationally, and in the same areas of social interaction. A quick check of the ubiquitous Gogglemachine will show the same observations, the same consensus by multiple observers. It doesn't have to involve complete strangers. My experiences, and those of friends, involving bullying by managers in the workplace has also increased in the past decade.

 Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Rant

A few months ago, I'd called a manager of a national group about help in a project; he spent ten profanity-packed minutes accusing me of complaining about him to a vendor, crudely bullying me in any way he could.

This person has a reputation; I wasn't so surprised -- but I hadn't experienced him in that way, and I was knocked off balance. My responses -- interrupted constantly -- were factual; at some point, this person realized he was wrong in his accusations -- and like flipping a light switch, suddenly he sounded friendly, reasonable, behaving as if the previous ten minutes hadn't happened. 

We both knew what he'd done -- and we both knew that even if I were to complain, because this person is labeled an "effective manager"; "he gets results"; there would be no repercussions.  I have a number of similar stories about other managers, and executives; so do my friends who work in corporate businesses, even 'cool' tech companies with "new" working cultures -- and they're all depressingly the same. 

These sorts of person are narcissistic, possibly sociopaths. They're certainly bullies -- and know that they are.  They've found a niche in society which not only tolerates manipulation and mistreatment of other human beings, but rewards and promotes it. For them, it's a point of pride -- after all, they get results. And that's all that matters.

Weeks before he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy observed that one measure of a nation is through the individuals it upholds as heroes, worthy of emulation.  Over the past few decades in America, the people we are told to venerate, our Best, are the Business Leaders. They're supposed to be what we should want our children to grow up to become.

I don't think we'd want to leave our children alone with them for thirty seconds. But the promise of wealth and success through a life spent in corporate business is what our children are being told is the highest expression of our culture, and the behaviors of these 'leaders' are what they need to adopt in order to reach that wealth, success and self-fulfillment. 

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A long time ago, a cartoon posed the question, "What was the result of America's experience in Vietnam, and the attendant politics at home?" The correct answer was, "A deterioration of secular and spiritual priorities!" American culture is fraying badly under the weight of too many changes -- just the last ten include mass shootings, terrorism; The Crash; media outlets (Murdoch; Limbaugh, Wiener, Beck; O'Reilly) dumping human waste on our culture, 24-7.  Our 'entertainment' almost universally involves violence.

The real wonder is that people aren't more uncivil to each other, or that overtime parking doesn't invoke the death sentence.

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Trump: A Symptom 

This week we watched (some of) the antics at the Republican Convention, the Trump campaign's themes delivered by most of the speakers -- except Grand Turtlebear Greg Stillson, and Herr Doktor Carson, Exorcist and Fearless Vampire Killer, who seemed to have additional messages of hope and faith and eternal punishment in the fire the fire the fire for us all. And, of course, we heard The Donald.

 Additional Obligatory Animal Photo

There was nothing new in what he said Thursday night (though its delivery was less his trademark stream-of-consciousness) -- but I found myself asking How the hell did we come to this? That this stupid bully became their candidate??  It was as if someone had reanimated Fr. Charles Coughlin from the 1930's, George Wallace of the 1960's, or even George Lincoln Rockwell.  Trump appeared no different or better than any of the narcissistic bullies I've worked with or for in my lifetime. One difference between his campaign and Hillary's -- Trump says that he speaks for the angry Americans, the ones who want to "take it all back".

His campaign depends on tapping the kind of inchoate rage that we see or experience on the street, or at work. If Trump were to win, it would mean a period of social and political dislocation in America which no one in memory has experienced. I could make a joke about a similarity with H.P. Lovecraft's return of Chtulu and the Old Ones, but in fact nobody knows where it would all lead.

That said, I still believe Trump can't win. If how a person uses language is a good gauge of how they conceptualize and navigate the world, then Trump is too scattered and impulsive -- my Dog's nose tells me he can't run an effective team, and won't run a good ground game.  And, there aren't enough of his brand of conservative to go to the polls for him on November 8th. He can't win by sheer weight of numbers. He'll lose.

But, this contest will be played in the media as a close race. The assumption of office by President Hillary, The Inevitable One, will seem so very close (until the numbers come in) -- and Her victory will provide the consistency of a certain narrative about our history, a return to normal.

But Hillary is about the values of Business, too. When Hillary trotted out Tim Kane as her Veep, he spoke to a crowd and said, "America has never been about fear... it's been about bravery, and imagination, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done! [applause]." Hillary described him as "a Progressive who believes in getting the job done" (Emphasis in the original delivery).

Additional Obligatory Stimpy Face Photo

It's my expectation Hillary will assist in wiring America into a global system which will free business and banking from being responsible to the laws of individual nations -- environmental regulations; banking laws, trade laws. It will be an advantage capitalism has never had in history, making corporate business the single most important human activity. And it will continue the stratification of society, globally, into corporate Managers -- and everyone else, who will work for them, to earn money to buy products and services.

We'll still continue to be told a comforting narrative -- about America's uniqueness, independence and values, and it's place in the world. Frankly, Hillary's narrative is just a little softer than Trump's story of American greatness; only the wrapper is different. But to global Business, America is just one more place with resources and a population that can be bought, one more market where things can be sold.  We can play our pretend politics, so long as we don't get in the way of the grownups, managing large-scale operations for profit.

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Without belaboring the obvious, it isn't surprising that so many people (including myself) are acting like badly-wired rats. The post-WW2 world's politics, ideologies, technologies; its commerce and wealth, all made major shifts in just one generation. 

There had been a Cold War, and the possibility of a hot one, but also stability -- many regional players and ideologies (including those religious) were kept in check by the East-versus-West balance of power. No more. 

It's been decades of pressure; the cycles of change happen more quickly, and the world appears to be changing in unpredictable ways. The trends being presented by these changes appear to indicate that the world is a Box Full Of Bad Crazy, Looking For A Way Out. And that The Fix Is In.

People are frightened about the future, and fear can easily flip into anger. Most people have some unresolved conflicts; others have years of badly-wired resentments and painful memories; still more have PTSD  (thanks for the War, Lil' Boots!). This election season will be something to watch (I'd buy the Good Popcorn, but don't fire it up just yet) but the presidency of Hillary The Inevitable will not provide America what it needs to heal itself. I don't think even Ted Cruz and Benny Carson's jesus™ could do that.

Try not to piss anyone off in public.

________________________________

Sentencing

Character, Defined

CHICAGO (New York Times Online) J. Dennis Hastert, once among this nation’s most powerful politicians, was sentenced to 15 months in prison on Wednesday for illegally structuring bank transactions in an effort to cover up his sexual abuse of young members of a wrestling team he coached decades ago... “The defendant is a serial child molester,” said [Federal District Court] Judge Thomas M. Durkin... in a tough rebuke of the former speaker before issuing his sentence.

 ...

A long list of supporters — from Mr. Hastert’s wife Jean to Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader — sent letters of support for Mr. Hastert to Judge Durkin. “He doesn’t deserve what he is going through,” Mr. DeLay wrote.

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Katrina

Character

Rick Bower, AP - Canal Sreet,; September 4, 2005

Most mainstream news organizations are hosting ten-year retrospectives of one of the most tragic natural disasters to befall a major, iconic American city -- the flooding of New Orleans at the end of August, 2005, caused by one of the most powerful storms to hit the U.S.: Hurricane Katrina.

Not that unnatural disasters haven't occurred to cities in the U.S. -- the abandonment of Detroit is the most obvious; Love Canal in the 1960's, Manhattan on 9-11; even other natural disasters like the Great Johnstown or Brownsville Floods; the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. But the catastrophe in New Orleans was different -- because of who lived in the city; and who was in charge of the government which was supposed to protect and rescue its citizens. All its citizens.

It became a tragedy watched in near-real-time on cable and mainstream news, and it was magnified by indifference, arrogance and incompetence. Today everyone just calls it 'Katrina'.

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Terms like Personality and Character are used to describe traits of an individual -- 'personality' referring to something mutable, changeable; while 'character' is something more essential and fundamental, the bedrock and framework unique to each person that animates a 'personality' like a suit of clothing -- the upshot being that personality can change, but not character: Blood will out. A Leopard can't change its spots.

For me this week, remembering Katrina is a short meditation on the idea of Character, as personified by two women -- one black and poor, the other white and a member of the top one-hundredth of our One Per Centers.

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On Monday morning, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina had slammed into the coast of Louisiana; four major levees had been breached around New Orleans and much of the city was flooded. People had died. More were dying. Thousands were losing everything they could not carry.

To escape the flooding, 11-year-old Danielle Mollett helped her ill grandmother Diane Mollett, 64, up into the attic of their home in the Ninth Ward, the area of lowest elevation in New Orleans and the district that would be hardest hit by the flooding. 

In the aftermath of the Hurricane's landfall, the weather turned tropical, sultry; temperatures rose -- hard on those trapped in the confines of an attic. With no food and little to drink, they waited for help.

Danielle Mollett, Interviewed For The August 24, 2015 Edition Of CBS News (CBS)

On that same August morning, George "Lil' Boots" Bush -- the "Decider" -- appeared in Arizona to present a birthday cake to John McCain. He spoke about his plan for Medicare, and gave Katrina only a passing mention.

 Bush had been told that the New Orleans levees might not hold, that there was potential for a catastrophe. That this had happened, that 85% of the city was deeply flooded, had already been communicated to the White House on the evening of August 29th.

On August 30, New Orleans had descended into something out of Dante. At the same time, Lil' Boots appeared in California, at the Coronado Naval Air Station in San Diego, where he had delivered his 2003 "Mission Accomplished!" speech, claiming Vic'try in Iraq.  Bush spoke about those wonderful times -- and made mention of Katrina, saying help would be coming "any day now".  And he was photographed trying to play a guitar.

Lil' Boots left for Crawford, Texas on Air Force One,  intending to take a Labor-Day vacation at 'The Ranch'.  White House aides, aware of what was happening in Louisiana, suggested the situation was serious enough that the President return to Washington.  Lil' Boots was not happy, but agreed to cut short his vacation by a whole day, but through that night it became clearer just how bad it was in New Orleans.

On August 31st, Lil' Boots demanded that he be flown from Texas, low over the city, on Air Force One. The huge 747 buzzed the area repeatedly for over a hour -- interrupting relief efforts requiring helicopters. As Bush stared out a window, press secretary Scott McClellan later quoted him as saying, "It's devastating. It's gotta be doubly devastating on the ground." 

Bush returned that day to the White House, held a cabinet meeting on Katrina, and spoke briefly in the Rose Garden to describe federal relief efforts.  FEMA's uncoordinated reaction before and after Katrina struck (and that of its polo-playing director, Michael Brown) had been stupefying. Mainstream television news had reported on the confused and ineffective relief efforts -- too little, too late, and most of it FUBAR.

Privately, Representative Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] urged Bush to fire Brown because of all that had gone wrong; "What didn't go right?" Lil' Boots replied, and on September 1st praised Brown publicly ("You're doin' a heckofa job, Brownie!").

8 days later, 'Brownie' was allowed to quietly step out of an active role in managing the crisis. On September 12th, he resigned as director of FEMA; in later testimony before Congress, Brown alleged "that Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin bore most, if not all, of the blame for the failures in the response to Katrina, and that his only fault had been not to realize sooner their inability to perform their respective duties." (Wikipedia)

_______________________________________

In New Orleans on August 31st, 11-year-old Danielle Mollett had managed to help her grandmother out of the attic where they had been trapped. Her grandmother's health was failing. They were lucky enough to be seen and rescued by one of the few boats bringing survivors out of flooded areas, taking them to the New Orleans Superdome stadium, which was situated on slightly higher ground than the rest of the city -- still, lower portions of the structure were flooded by three feet of water.

An estimated 30,000 people found their way to the Superdome between August 29 and September 2. Conditions were bad: limited food, water, sanitation and medical services; sewage systems were backed up by the flooding. The most seriously ill -- like 64-year-old Diane Mollett -- were given small folding cots to rest on.

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Boots, On The Little Rupert Network From New Orleans

To balance public perception that he showed little concern for the tragedy on the Gulf, Bush quickly flew back to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and fumbled through a long, photo-op tour of the region. He even made an 'Address To The Nation' from New Orleans. A few miles away, at the Superdome, not enough of the thousands of survivors had adequate food or water, and no one seemed able to get any to them.

______________________________________________

But by now, too many people had seen just how desperate things had become -- network news reporters at the Superdome were shaken by what they saw of the conditions there. On September 1st, Paula Zahn of CNN interviewed FEMA director Brown, who claimed to have "only just learned" 30,000 people in the damaged Superdome had no food or water: "Sir, you aren't just telling me you just learned that the folks at the Convention Center didn't have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off? " she asked, incredulous. 

Brown appeared bored as he replied, "Paula, the federal government did not even know about [them] until today" --an obvious lie, since evacuations from the Superdome had been going on, slowly, for over 24 hours.

No one seemed to be in charge. In FEMA's inactivity before the catastrophe, and its mismanagement in the aftermath obvious to anyone watching the news, the government's response seemed too little, too late. Another fuck-up, like Iraq -- Because FUBAR; and because the people suffering and dying in New Orleans were poor and primarily black.

On September 2, NBC broadcast a live Concert for Katrina, to raise awareness and money for relief efforts. Standing beside comic Mike Meyers, Kayne West offered an observation about the disaster which was broadcast live across America -- except on the West Coast, where tape delay allowed NBC to delete his remarks:

Meyer's Look ("OMG: On Teevee??") = Priceless

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. If it's a black family, it says we're looting. If it's a white family, it says they're looking for food. And you know that it's been five days because most of the people are black... We already realize that a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they have given them permission to go down and shoot us. George Bush didn't care about black people."

_______________________________________

On September 2, Diane Mollett died on her cot, waiting to be taken out of the flooded city to the Houston Astrodome. Her 11-year-old granddaughter Danielle was alone, surrounded by strangers in a nightmare; she would stay, "balled up inside myself" for two more days before being bussed, by herself, to distant relatives in Texas .

________________________________________

As a show of their own concern (and damage control for the Bush brand), former President George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush had reached out to former President Clinton to found a charity organization for relief and rebuilding.  On September 5th, Poppy and his wife, Barbara, toured the Astrodome in Houston, now filled by thousands of refugees from New Orleans.

Barbara Bush had recently spoken about her son's invasion of Iraq, which wasn't going well ("Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? ...It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?") -- and after her tour of the Astrodome made this observation, broadcast on National Public Radio's Marketwatch program:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they [refugees from New Orleans] all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the [Astrodome] here, you know, were underprivileged anyway; so this (chuckle) – this is working out very well for them."

______________________________________

Danielle Mollett wept, remembering the death of her grandmother. She has spent the last decade trying to remake her life and move beyond what she experienced in New Orleans. It's a proof of character, and its quality, that she's succeeded.

Then, there's Barbara Bush. Her remarks, and the social class she represents, provide indications and testaments as to the quality of her character, as well.  And, her son... well;  the less said about him, the better.

______________________________________

MEHR, MIT LUMPENHUND:  Lil' Boots -- too arrogant and limited to recognize that he has failed at almost everything he has attempted as an adult; too dim to recognize that he was an empty-suit front man for President Cheney -- appeared in New Orleans today to speak at a local school in commemoration of New Orleans, a city "which never gave up".

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Lil' Boots, you Poultroon *; you Lumpenhund nutter.

( * Poultroon = Archaic /Middle French: A rascal, a scoundrel; a coward. )

______________________________________

Reprint Heaven: Kulturschande *

John Derbyshire's Public, Total, And Irreversible Loss
Of Bowel And Bladder Control

(This, from April 2012; "Same As It Ever Was")

John Derbyshire, a conservative pundit and gadfly at the National Review (originally founded by William F. Buckley, and later run by unindicted war criminals), author of several books, including We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, provided us with a spectacle last week: Virtually dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a fantasy match, via this post at the Takimag website: "The Talk: Nonblack Version".

Apparently, John-Boy had read several articles that referenced a "talk" which at least some Black parents purportedly have with their children about living in a society dominated by non-African Americans (I've preserved some of the links to them from Derbyshire's original below):

[Derbyshire quotes:]“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.

Yes, talk about the talk is all over.

There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following...

Herr Derbyshire said, to paraphrase, Blacks are generally less intelligent than Caucasians or Asians, whom Blacks simply lump together as "white"; are more likely to be undeservedly promoted into management positions in the workplace; and are prone to violent behavior against "whites", if only on the basis of statistics. All this, and more like it, is what he tells his own children.

He tells this to his children. And where, pray, do people like him believe that racism comes from? Not only in the images and attitudes children unconsciously absorb from the world around them -- but because someone teaches them.

It's What They Do

Some pundits with a large soapbox to stand on, or their own site -- precisely because they publish lies and drivel, and use the Net to sling their own feces beyond their cages -- deserve to be ignored, vilified; to have their IP addresses blocked and sent to dwell in the land of Little Rupert, East of Podhoretz, with the crying, and the wailing, and the gnashing of mandibles (and the hey hey hey, as Professor Frink might tell us).

A few obvious examples of public masturbation are Drudge, Malkin; Goldberg, Erikson; and Breitbart (a Grand Public Masterdebater); but it's a long list. Thinking human beings recoil from the junk that spills out of their addled minds and into the rinse-cycle whirl of the Intertubes (Or, we laugh our asses off. Or both). They deserve our contempt, and receive it -- but they won't leave. They won't perform a swan song -- a GBCW! post: Good-Bye, Cruel World!.

However, the GBCW doesn't tend to happen in Right Blogostan, where the operative principle is to lie, and outrageously. As (for example) Breitbart and O'Keefe have shown us, don't just strain credulity, piss on it. And, Right bloggers have automatic support among a large community, willing to swallow every wingnut, asshat, echo-chamber fantasy of the moment.

Because, you see, the Right must stand in solidarity. They see a hostile world, dominated by elite Liberals and their Media; Jews; non-white people; and the undeserving poor and undocumented aliens, all supported by the taxes of honest working Americans (Also, there are giant radioactive scorpions being trained by the UN to bring about a one-world government headed by George Soros).

So You Wanna Be One Of The Kool Kidz

Sometimes, the GBCW is purely voluntary. At some level, the Blogosphere -- Left or Right -- mimics high school. Bloggers and regular commentors tend to affiliate, and like any other association of humans can be exclusionary. On occasion someone appears whose style in posting comments is grating, awkward. They insist on being right, on dominating a thread; they just don't express ideas well. They may be off-topic, and are thin-skinned when teased -- as they will be (humans are humans, and anonymous ones even more so).

Usually, these people have a blog of their own. They want to be one of the Kool Kidz, too, and have lots of site traffic -- to be popular. To "be someone". The problem is, they already are someone, and that they've confused the raison d'etre of their blog, or commenting on someone else's post, with wanting to appear on something like the old Gong Show.

So, when no one reads their amazingly important, detailed, lengthy blog posts; and they're ignored when adding to threads on other sites... finally, they may write that GBCW post, clomping off the Internet stage with a final, long soliloquy explaining ad nauseum why they are right and the rest of the world is wrong, wrong, wrong; and also, bad. If they are religious, they may hint darkly that god (somebody's god, anyway) will punish everyone for not eagerly lapping up their vomit.

(For some reason, I'm reminded of R. Crumb's Everyman character, Flakey Foont, constantly looking to Mister Natural for enlightenment, befuddled; angry at his mistreatment in life. In one final panel, Foont weeps as, in a thought bubble, he imagines his tombstone's epitaph: Here Lies Flakey Foont / A Beautiful Soul / Crushed By An Uncaring World..)

Wingnut Self-Immolation

Then, there's the other category of GBCW, almost unique to the Right, where a Rightist pundit's mask slips and the true reptilian horror is shown for all to see and wonder at. This sort of thing happens all the time -- you can't get through a week without a Rightist politician, or self-proclaimed pundit like Lard Boy, saying something insulting or incendiary.

So, when a wingnut pundit like Derbyshire can't maintain the Right's cherished fiction of bipartisan cooperation, or that they believe non-white persons are their equals, for anyone on the Right to take notice their outburst has to cross a line that is damaging for conservatism in general -- particularly in an election year.

A recent example: Lard Boy's public ridicule of a young woman as a slut and a prostitute, over her appearance before Congress on the subject of contraception. After enough heavy-hitters on the Right strongly hinted he'd stepped over a line, El Fathead reluctantly made a self-justifying half-apology -- as good as you'll get from a pathetic bully like Rush.

Trent Lott Flies The Bonny Blue Flag

But an example more to the point is then-Senator Trent Lott's fulsome praise of Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party in 2002: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him," Said Trent. "We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either".

Thurmond had run for president in 1948 as a 'Dixiecrat', expousing what Wikipedia notes as "an explicit States' Rights platform that challenged the Civil Rights Movement and later, the Civil Rights Act as illegally overturning the Separation of powers under the United States Constitution." In other words, Antebellum 'Southern values'.

In the appropriate storm of criticism that followed, Lott was forced to resign as Majority Leader of the Senate in 2003, and blamed the evil nasty Intertubes bloggers for keeping the story alive (Lott resigned from the Senate in 2007, and opened a lobbying firm a block from the Senate offices).

Missy Laura Talks To The Nation

On August 10, 2010, Laura Schlessenger, right-wing radio commentator "Doctor Laura", had an exchange with a Black woman who had called in to her syndicated program to speak about a personal issue: Occasional racial slurs her husband (who is Caucasian) and his friends would make in front of her.

CALLER: I'm having an issue with my husband where I'm starting to grow very resentful of him. I'm black, and he's white. We've been around some of his friends and family members who start making racist comments as if I'm not there or if I'm not black. And my husband ignores those comments, and it hurts my feelings. And he acts like --

SCHLESSINGER: Well, can you give me an example of a racist comment? 'Cause sometimes people are hypersensitive. So tell me what's -- give me two good examples of racist comments.

CALLER: OK. Last night -- good example -- we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor -- when every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, "Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?" And, "Do black people really like doing that?" And for a long time, I would ignore it. But last night, I got to the point where it --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist.

CALLER: Well, the stereotype --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist. No, I think that --

CALLER: [unintelligible]

SCHLESSINGER: No, no, no. I think that's -- well, listen, without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says -- we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here -- the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, "White men can't jump; I want you on my team." That was racist? That was funny.

CALLER: How about the N-word? So, the N-word's been thrown around --

SCHLESSINGER: Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n----r, n----r, n----r.

CALLER: That isn't --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing. Don't hang up, I want to talk to you some more. Don't go away.

I'm Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I'll be right back.

It continued in the same vein after "Doctor Laura" returned. "Yeah," Frau Schlessenger said; "We've got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that's hilarious". When the caller disagreed, the good doctor responded, "[You've] got a chip on your shoulder. Can't do much about that."

Frau Schlessenger spent much of the next week trying to defend herself on air, and on August 17, announced on Larry King Live that she was leaving commercial AM radio, moving to subscription-only Sirrus to continue her special brand of joy without "some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent."

Old School Dog-Whistle

Derbyshire is originally British, a naturalized American citizen; well-educated; his wife is Asian, and his sons are mixed-race Amerasians. You'd think he knew exactlywhat was about to happen as he clicked "Send" to upload his article to 'Takimag', and it did: The National Review terminated Derbyshire; the NROnline's editor, Rich Lowry, posted:

[Derbyshire's] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways.

(I so like Lowry's use of the nickname, "Derb"; it smacks of Groton or Andover, of lacrosse or crew at Yale. Just kind of tone the NR likes to have amongst its own; so "Our Crowd".)

I don't agree with Lowry that Derbyshire's views are such that the NR "would never associate ourselves otherwise". I believe the Right perpetuates racist perspectives, the common assumptions that Derbyshire is so willing to teach his children -- but assumptions only admitted to quietly, between the "right sort" of people.

One Cardinal rule of the wingnut tribe is not to embarrass the Right by admitting to its true shared values, particularly about how icky Blacks and The Poor are (they're so -- well, so Black, and so poor). Derbyshire's irretrievable sin was to say so, openly and in public.

But in calling him 'Derb' (both affectionate and dismissive at once), Lowry showed he didn't repudiate an old friend and member of his class; only that he was uncomfortable with Derb's statements. Lowry will meet Ol' Derb, buy him a drink and say, "What were you thinking, Derb? I mean, we all know about 'Those People'; but you had to go and say it. I had to cut you from the NR; you didn't really give me a choice, old man."

(Think this is a stretch? Possibly. But I doubt it.)

The Right is eager to play the race card with a sitting Black President, but they have to do it through innuendo, metaphors, verbal allusions. I understand that I'm offering no examples, but I believe Lowry and people like him on the Right tacitly support Derbyshire's "views" concerning the comparative intelligence, aggression and "otherness" of Blacks in America. And, so they can't be accused of overt racism, they'll just make oblique references. They'll use the dog whistle.

Race is an issue in America. There's been a tremendous amount of racist garbage, blog posts and comments, crudely-drawn cartoons, aimed not at Obama's policies but at his race (One of the first comments I heard after the 2008 election from someone at work was, "Guess we can't call it the 'White House' anymore!").

And Right blogostan has never stopped baying about the 'conspiracy' around the legitimacy of his birth certificate. Breitbart's last super-secret, stop-the-presses video was about Obama giving someone a hug -- proof of his radicalism, that he is (hint, hint) a Black man first and an American second.

You can barely hear the National Anthem any longer for all the dog-whistling on the Right that's been going on since 2008. And none of the Good Ole Boys repudiates it; I see Sessions, Haley Barbour, and Saxby Chambliss (who crawled into office by calling a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran a traitor) whining on television and want to puke. People like this are a shame on my country.

We're a badly polarized society -- possibly more so than at any time since The Great Depression, certainly since 1965 -- and at a time when we can least afford to be so divided. Asshats like Derbyshire (aber natürlich, only for the purest of reasons) have pushed and escalated our society's divisions and put us at each others' throats. They'd like to keep us there.

Race is an issue in America. Electing Barack Obama as president didn't solve it. I'm not happy with Obama as a president, or a Democrat -- but it would never cross my mind to believe his public policies or decision-making are the product of his being Black.

The Right, on the other hand, seems to think that is the case -- and while Derbyshire will be publicly repudiated by conservatives for his remarks, many of those same people on the Right will attempt to perform a quiet, virtual lynching as they attempt to 'save' America from ... the Justice in Equality, I guess.

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Derbyshire, you Lumpenhund nutter.

---

( * "Kulturschande" Is more than just bringing shame upon one's culture, because the concept in German of Kultur encompasses much more than that. But, trust me; it's pejorative.)

---

NOTE: Offered without comment, per Wikipedia: "In early 2012, [Derbyshire] underwent treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia."

Kulturschande *

John Derbyshire's Public, Total, And Irreversible Loss
Of Bowel And Bladder Control

John Derbyshire, a conservative pundit and gadfly at the National Review (originally founded by William F. Buckley, and later run by unindicted war criminals), author of several books, including We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, provided us with a spectacle last week: Virtually dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a fantasy match, via this post at the Takimag website: "The Talk: Nonblack Version".

Apparently, John-Boy had read several articles that referenced a "talk" which at least some Black parents purportedly have with their children about living in a society dominated by non-African Americans (I've preserved some of the links to them from Derbyshire's original below):

[Derbyshire quotes:]“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.

Yes, talk about the talk is all over.

There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following...

Herr Derbyshire said, to paraphrase, Blacks are generally less intelligent than Caucasians or Asians, whom Blacks simply lump together as "white"; are more likely to be undeservedly promoted into management positions in the workplace; and are prone to violent behavior against "whites", if only on the basis of statistics. All this, and more like it, is what he tells his own children.

He tells this to his children. And where, pray, do people like him believe that racism comes from? Not only in the images and attitudes children unconsciously absorb from the world around them -- but because someone teaches them.

It's What They Do

Some pundits with a large soapbox to stand on, or their own site -- precisely because they publish lies and drivel, and use the Net to sling their own feces beyond their cages -- deserve to be ignored, vilified; to have their IP addresses blocked and sent to dwell in the land of Little Rupert, East of Podhoretz, with the crying, and the wailing, and the gnashing of mandibles (and the hey hey hey, as Professor Frink might tell us).

A few obvious examples of public masturbation are Drudge, Malkin; Goldberg, Erikson; and Breitbart (a Grand Public Masterdebater); but it's a long list. Thinking human beings recoil from the junk that spills out of their addled minds and into the rinse-cycle whirl of the Intertubes (Or, we laugh our asses off. Or both). They deserve our contempt, and receive it -- but they won't leave. They won't perform a swan song -- a GBCW! post: Good-Bye, Cruel World!.

However, the GBCW doesn't tend to happen in Right Blogostan, where the operative principle is to lie, and outrageously. As (for example) Breitbart and O'Keefe have shown us, don't just strain credulity, piss on it. And, Right bloggers have automatic support among a large community, willing to swallow every wingnut, asshat, echo-chamber fantasy of the moment.

Because, you see, the Right must stand in solidarity. They see a hostile world, dominated by elite Liberals and their Media; Jews; non-white people; and the undeserving poor and undocumented aliens, all supported by the taxes of honest working Americans (Also, there are giant radioactive scorpions being trained by the UN to bring about a one-world government headed by George Soros).

So You Wanna Be One Of The Kool Kidz

Sometimes, the GBCW is purely voluntary. At some level, the Blogosphere -- Left or Right -- mimics high school. Bloggers and regular commentors tend to affiliate, and like any other association of humans can be exclusionary. On occasion someone appears whose style in posting comments is grating, awkward. They insist on being right, on dominating a thread; they just don't express ideas well. They may be off-topic, and are thin-skinned when teased -- as they will be (humans are humans, and anonymous ones even more so).

Usually, these people have a blog of their own. They want to be one of the Kool Kidz, too, and have lots of site traffic -- to be popular. To "be someone". The problem is, they already are someone, and that they've confused the raison d'etre of their blog, or commenting on someone else's post, with wanting to appear on something like the old Gong Show.

So, when no one reads their amazingly important, detailed, lengthy blog posts; and they're ignored when adding to threads on other sites... finally, they may write that GBCW post, clomping off the Internet stage with a final, long soliloquy explaining ad nauseum why they are right and the rest of the world is wrong, wrong, wrong; and also, bad. If they are religious, they may hint darkly that god (somebody's god, anyway) will punish everyone for not eagerly lapping up their vomit.

(For some reason, I'm reminded of R. Crumb's Everyman character, Flakey Foont, constantly looking to Mister Natural for enlightenment, befuddled; angry at his mistreatment in life. In one final panel, Foont weeps as, in a thought bubble, he imagines his tombstone's epitaph: Here Lies Flakey Foont / A Beautiful Soul / Crushed By An Uncaring World..)

Wingnut Self-Immolation

Then, there's the other category of GBCW, almost unique to the Right, where a Rightist pundit's mask slips and the true reptilian horror is shown for all to see and wonder at. This sort of thing happens all the time -- you can't get through a week without a Rightist politician, or self-proclaimed pundit like Lard Boy, saying something insulting or incendiary.

So, when a wingnut pundit like Derbyshire can't maintain the Right's cherished fiction of bipartisan cooperation, or that they believe non-white persons are their equals, for anyone on the Right to take notice their outburst has to cross a line that is damaging for conservatism in general -- particularly in an election year.

A recent example: Lard Boy's public ridicule of a young woman as a slut and a prostitute, over her appearance before Congress on the subject of contraception. After enough heavy-hitters on the Right strongly hinted he'd stepped over a line, El Fathead reluctantly made a self-justifying half-apology -- as good as you'll get from a pathetic bully like Rush.

Trent Lott Flies The Bonny Blue Flag

But an example more to the point is then-Senator Trent Lott's fulsome praise of Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party in 2002: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him," Said Trent. "We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either".

Thurmond had run for president in 1948 as a 'Dixiecrat', expousing what Wikipedia notes as "an explicit States' Rights platform that challenged the Civil Rights Movement and later, the Civil Rights Act as illegally overturning the Separation of powers under the United States Constitution." In other words, Antebellum 'Southern values'.

In the appropriate storm of criticism that followed, Lott was forced to resign as Majority Leader of the Senate in 2003, and blamed the evil nasty Intertubes bloggers for keeping the story alive (Lott resigned from the Senate in 2007, and opened a lobbying firm a block from the Senate offices).

Missy Laura Talks To The Nation

On August 10, 2010, Laura Schlessenger, right-wing radio commentator "Doctor Laura", had an exchange with a Black woman who had called in to her syndicated program to speak about a personal issue: Occasional racial slurs her husband (who is Caucasian) and his friends would make in front of her.

CALLER: I'm having an issue with my husband where I'm starting to grow very resentful of him. I'm black, and he's white. We've been around some of his friends and family members who start making racist comments as if I'm not there or if I'm not black. And my husband ignores those comments, and it hurts my feelings. And he acts like --

SCHLESSINGER: Well, can you give me an example of a racist comment? 'Cause sometimes people are hypersensitive. So tell me what's -- give me two good examples of racist comments.

CALLER: OK. Last night -- good example -- we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor -- when every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, "Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?" And, "Do black people really like doing that?" And for a long time, I would ignore it. But last night, I got to the point where it --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist.

CALLER: Well, the stereotype --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist. No, I think that --

CALLER: [unintelligible]

SCHLESSINGER: No, no, no. I think that's -- well, listen, without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says -- we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here -- the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, "White men can't jump; I want you on my team." That was racist? That was funny.

CALLER: How about the N-word? So, the N-word's been thrown around --

SCHLESSINGER: Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n----r, n----r, n----r.

CALLER: That isn't --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing. Don't hang up, I want to talk to you some more. Don't go away.

I'm Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I'll be right back.

It continued in the same vein after "Doctor Laura" returned. "Yeah," Frau Schlessenger said; "We've got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that's hilarious". When the caller disagreed, the good doctor responded, "[You've] got a chip on your shoulder. Can't do much about that."

Frau Schlessenger spent much of the next week trying to defend herself on air, and on August 17, announced on Larry King Live that she was leaving commercial AM radio, moving to subscription-only Sirrus to continue her special brand of joy without "some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent."

Old School Dog-Whistle

Derbyshire is originally British, a naturalized American citizen; well-educated; his wife is Asian, and his sons are mixed-race Amerasians. You'd think he knew exactlywhat was about to happen as he clicked "Send" to upload his article to 'Takimag', and it did: The National Review terminated Derbyshire; the NROnline's editor, Rich Lowry, posted:

[Derbyshire's] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways.

(I so like Lowry's use of the nickname, "Derb"; it smacks of Groton or Andover, of lacrosse or crew at Yale. Just kind of tone the NR likes to have amongst its own; so "Our Crowd".)

I don't agree with Lowry that Derbyshire's views are such that the NR "would never associate ourselves otherwise". I believe the Right perpetuates racist perspectives, the common assumptions that Derbyshire is so willing to teach his children -- but assumptions only admitted to quietly, between the "right sort" of people.

One Cardinal rule of the wingnut tribe is not to embarrass the Right by admitting to its true shared values, particularly about how icky Blacks and The Poor are (they're so -- well, so Black, and so poor). Derbyshire's irretrievable sin was to say so, openly and in public.

But in calling him 'Derb' (both affectionate and dismissive at once), Lowry showed he didn't repudiate an old friend and member of his class; only that he was uncomfortable with Derb's statements. Lowry will meet Ol' Derb, buy him a drink and say, "What were you thinking, Derb? I mean, we all know about 'Those People'; but you had to go and say it. I had to cut you from the NR; you didn't really give me a choice, old man."

(Think this is a stretch? Possibly. But I doubt it.)

The Right is eager to play the race card with a sitting Black President, but they have to do it through innuendo, metaphors, verbal allusions. I understand that I'm offering no examples, but I believe Lowry and people like him on the Right tacitly support Derbyshire's "views" concerning the comparative intelligence, aggression and "otherness" of Blacks in America. And, so they can't be accused of overt racism, they'll just make oblique references. They'll use the dog whistle.

Race is an issue in America. There's been a tremendous amount of racist garbage, blog posts and comments, crudely-drawn cartoons, aimed not at Obama's policies but at his race (One of the first comments I heard after the 2008 election from someone at work was, "Guess we can't call it the 'White House' anymore!").

And Right blogostan has never stopped baying about the 'conspiracy' around the legitimacy of his birth certificate. Breitbart's last super-secret, stop-the-presses video was about Obama giving someone a hug -- proof of his radicalism, that he is (hint, hint) a Black man first and an American second.

You can barely hear the National Anthem any longer for all the dog-whistling on the Right that's been going on since 2008. And none of the Good Ole Boys repudiates it; I see Sessions, Haley Barbour, and Saxby Chambliss (who crawled into office by calling a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran a traitor) whining on television and want to puke. People like this are a shame on my country.

We're a badly polarized society -- possibly more so than at any time since The Great Depression, certainly since 1965 -- and at a time when we can least afford to be so divided. Asshats like Derbyshire (aber natürlich, only for the purest of reasons) have pushed and escalated our society's divisions and put us at each others' throats. They'd like to keep us there.

Race is an issue in America. Electing Barack Obama as president didn't solve it. I'm not happy with Obama as a president, or a Democrat -- but it would never cross my mind to believe his public policies or decision-making are the product of his being Black.

The Right, on the other hand, seems to think that is the case -- and while Derbyshire will be publicly repudiated by conservatives for his remarks, many of those same people on the Right will attempt to perform a quiet, virtual lynching as they attempt to 'save' America from ... the Justice in Equality, I guess.

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Derbyshire, you Lumpenhund nutter.

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( * "Kulturschande" Is more than just bringing shame upon one's culture, because the concept in German of Kultur encompasses much more than that. But, trust me; it's pejorative.)

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Little Michele Bows Out

Crazy Lady Says Buh-Bye



The national press speaks of GrandTurtlebear Bachmann of the Church Of Crazy Lady™ as if they just aren't sure how someone who scored so well in the Ames straw poll in the spring could have ended their presidential aspirations by Augering In at the Iowa Caucus this week.

Pundits scratch their heads, talk about 'missed opportunities' or hint at misjudgements made by her advisers. But that's not the reason she's out.

The pundits are being very, very polite -- or very, very stupid: It's because she's a Loon. She's an obviously crazy person.

That, even now, anyone ever took her seriously as a candidate for the presidential nomination says a great deal about both the Republican party and the state of politics in America. None of it is good.

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Michele, you nutter. Over and Out.

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El Testa Di Cazzo Di Tutta l'Europa Berlusconi Resigns

Rome Greets Announcement With More Austerity

New Reaches Rome Of The Poco Pene's Resignation

As Italy's people steady themselves to withstand the rigors of Austerity which the EU demands as price for saving the Euro lending German and French banks, really Italy money -- the selfsame Italian people took Winston Churchill's advice on V-E day, and "allowed ourselves a brief period of celebration".

Silvio Berlusconi resigned today as Prime Minister of the Republic Of Italy, after nearly two decades of playing factions within Italy's political parties off against each other, in order to deliver a (sometimes) working coalition in the country's Parliament. This was the real reason he hadn't been gotten rid of earlier, not some indispensable personal ability or sage leadership. He was canny -- what the Germans refer to as Schlau -- but ultimately, not possessed of high intelligence.

He also used his position as Prime Minister to make some deals -- he is a Billionaire, and as a member of the planet's Oligarch class, saw nothing wrong with it. In that connection, Berlusconi was accused of money laundering and witness tampering and bribery, trying to evade the charges by having a law passed through the Parliament, giving the Italian Prime Minister immunity from prosecution for any crime -- only to have it repealed.

He also treated the international public to a flamboyant peep-show of his private life; it was the women he dallied with who passed on details to an ever-hungry Tabloid press. And it was in that connection which made him beloved to a superinteligent parakeet and the four other readers of Before Nine.

Obligatory Photo Of Superintelligent Parakeet In Middle Of Blog Rant

So, as he slinks back to his palatial estates and can return to manipulating the Italian people through what issues from the media empire he owns -- here are a few links to our Roll Of Shame for Silvio! -- Chief Clown Prince Of Europe!

May, 2009: See Naples And Divorce

June, 2009: Comedy Relief: Arrogance So Large It Has Its Own Postal Code

September, 2009: He Thinks With Little Silvio, Which Isn't That Bright. Come To
Think Of It, Big Silvio's Stupid, Too.

October, 2009: Meanwhile, In Downtown Italy

December, 2009: Berlusconi Attacked By Cathedral

March, 2010: Wearing Purple, Seeing Red

December, 2010: Salvato! Silvio Salvato Per Avere il sesso con più ragazze adolescenti!

February, 2011: Oh God; Not Again

Now, Italy will go forward, bravely keeping the Banksters and the rich warm, and safe, and with many treats. Just as our Tea Partei and GOP, and many Democrats, want to do right here in the Good Old Eusa.

Silvio Berlusconi: Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, you Nutter.

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