Saturday, October 20, 2012

Roger Ailes Calls NYT "Scum"


 Imagine The Surprise

 The "Roger Ailes" Balloon For The Upcoming Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
(Photo: Flikr Hive Mind)

Roger Ailes, appointed by Little Rupert Murdoch to run Fox cable news, referred to reporters for the New York Times as "lying scum".
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I posted a much longer rant about this, but frankly I'm a little tired of bile, including my own.  Human nature is often disappointing, small and mean; Ailes is a good representative of the kind of person who makes the world worse, dirtier and more confined in which to live.

There's enough in the public record about his actions which define him clearly; I don't need to add to it, and you don't need to read it.

As the old Zen saying goes, If you sit by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by. One day we'll read Ailes' obituary, and the effects of his actions in the world will be what defines him, as it's true for all of us.

Until then, go outside; enjoy the day. Spend time with friends.

Ailes will still be who he is, and he will be fat.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

An Offering Of Darkness

One-Trick Pony

 Mitzy, Wandering In Search Of Substance For His Campaign
(Original Photo: Jim Young / Reuters)

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

About Goddamn Time

Town Hall

 "Governor; Sit Down": Richie Rich, Not Happy With Being Told What To Do

I'm not an O-Bot; I'm a Dog, no matter what the Banner this week looks like. But I will not seek, nor will I accept, another replay of the go-go, Lil' Boots' Bush years.

That said, does Obama's team finally understand that, 'independents' aside, what Democrats nationally had to see -- nay; have been begging for, is a show of fire and spine?

I mean, it's one thing to stand out in the snow and sing "The Internationale" until the Cossacks show up. We'll do that. But it's hard going without seeing the embodiment of (albeit tainted) resistance providing a public (albeit failed) enema to the embodiment of the 0.01%. 
MALONE: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see, what I'm saying is: What are you prepared to do?
NESS: Anything within the law.
MALONE: And then what are you prepared to do? If you open this can of worms, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they're not gonna give up the fight -- until one of you is dead.
NESS: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to do it.
MALONE: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital; you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone. Now; do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?
NESS: I have sworn to capture this man with all legal powers at my disposal and I will do so.
MALONE: [Sighs] Well... the Lord hates a coward. [offers NESS his hand; NESS shakes it] Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?
NESS: Yes.
MALONE: Good, 'cause you just took one.

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MEHR:  Mitzy's son, Tagg, one of his father's closest campaign advisers, told a conservative talk-show host in North Carolina (are there any other kinds, down there?) said that he would have liked to "take a swing" at the President during the Tuesday debate when Obama suggested that candidate Romney had some teensy issues with telling the truth.
“You want to rush down the debate stage and take a swing at him but you know you can’t do that because, well first cause there is a lot of secret service between you and him,” Tagg Romney said of what he would have liked to during the presidential debate earlier this week.

“This is the nature of the process,” the Romney son said, who sounded jovial in his remarks. “You know they are going to do everything they can to try to make my dad into someone he’s not. We signed up for it. We gotta kinda sit there and take our punches, and then send them back the other way.”

A campaign aide later told ABC News that Tagg Romney’s remarks were all in jest.
 These are the kinds of comments that spilled easily from the mouth of "Lil' Boots" Bush, either as a candidate or as the appointed President. 

Tagg's comments were of course echoed by his brothers Gnargn, Horst, Heber, Reinhard and Fluke.
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Monday, October 15, 2012

Boneryänker's Almanach

We Really Were That Close: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

President Nixon Urges Americans To Take Shelter, 1962

Just a thought:  If Richard M. Nixon had been President, rather than John F. Kennedy, on October 16, 1962, American response to a discovery of Russian IRBM's in Cuba would have been resolved in a very different way.

Nixon was an insecure human being, and a true-believing Cold Warrior.  It would have been a near-certainty that the same response plan pushed on JFK by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- an air attack on the missile sites, followed by an invasion of Cuba -- which Kennedy successfully resisted, would have been Nixon's decision.

It's now known that the Russians also had short-range, tactical nukes in Cuba (referred to as "Frogs"), and local control of those devices had been released to Russian commanders of Soviet troops handling them in the field.  The hardline Soviet Politburo members had approved this and were just as fucked-up lizard brain crazy as Nixon expecting to use them on any American invasion, which was already beginning to stage in ports along the Gulf of Mexico.

If the Russians had used their tactical nukes, escalation to a full thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have followed in a matter of days, if not hours.


Several hundred million people would have died outright, and over the next few months as food supplies dwindled and Winter set in. If you're American, or European, you would probably be dead now, or never born -- or, born into a horribly broken, radioactive world.

It might be argued that, had Nixon been elected, the 1961 Bay Of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained and supported right-wing Cubans would have been provided U.S. air support and may have succeeded in forcing Castro from power. And, had Nixon been elected, that likely would have happened.
(Nixon lost the 1960 election by the thinnest of margins -- some conservatives believed the election had been stolen by the Kennedys in Texas and Illinois; they were more than pissed. When Kennedy -- who reluctantly went along with the plan -- later refused to commit U.S. warplanes to support the Cuban expatriate invaders, some in the military and the CIA began to hate him; JFK dismissed several critics who went public.)

(But the major result of the Bay of Pigs was the Russian suggestion to move their IRBM missiles into Cuba, arguing that it would be a strategic fait d'accompli -- by the time America knew what was happening, it would be too late, and they would never again attempt to invade the island. Castro thought this logical and agreed.)
The Bay Of Pigs was planned by the CIA in 1959 and 60 to rid the hemisphere of a Communist threat: The "Big Red Dog", in our own backyard.  But if Nixon had pushed it all the way, it also might have forced the Soviets (whose hardliners wouldn't have passively accepted an invasion) to react -- possibly seizing West Berlin,  and creating another on-the-brink crisis.



The strategic nuclear forces of East and West were on a "Launch On Warning" status in the late 1950's and early 60's.  One lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis for both sides was that the unthinkable really was possible -- and fortunately for humanity, some on both sides refused to accept that annihilation was inevitable, and took steps to allow everyone to move back from the brink.

But in the alternate historical reality pushed by America's Right, JFK wasn't an American hero -- just some indecisive candyass liberal, an oversexed toad, an appeaser to global Communism, 'cause a real man woulda kicked their Red asses.

Oy.  Some people never learn anything.
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Saturday, October 13, 2012

An Advance Note

Random Barking

I'm fond of saying that there are three people and a super-intelligent Parakeet who read this blog on any regular basis, and since the Fall of 2008 it's been a rough, semi-regular conduit for one level of personal creativity.

Out here in The Intertubes, anyone can promote the most bizarre theories, show hardcore adult material, or the 10,000 photos of a trip to Milwaukee, share the most deeply esoteric or intolerant religious doctrines. And (what corporate America sees as the Net's true purpose) you can look at, buy and sell stuff.

Whatever you want, man; it's the Wild West out there.

What makes all that possible is the current democratic structure of the Net.  At least in the West, it isn't yet controlled by corporate or government interests in an obvious way -- though the Net is heavily mined and monitored by those same interests, for security, intelligence and marketing reasons.  But for individuals the 'Tubes are still fairly democratic (I understand there are differing opinions about this). You vote with your Mouse -- utilize a search engine; surf in, stay and look around, or click away.

If your primary business is web design, pushing product, or message, or expressing an opinion, your Alexa or Klout numbers, total Facebook followers and Twits are all-important. On that level it's a popularity contest, which develops in any media dependent on Market Share.

At least outwardly, that's why Fox decided to ditch Little Glenny Beck, and why the MSM continues to pay so much attention to a vapid hack like Drudge.  If more "media consumers" believed they were nothing but gleeful pushers of right-wing lies, they might vanish (but no other network has been willing to develop an opposing business model to challenge Fox or ClearChannel).

Then, there's the opinion section of Blogtopia -- mostly personal blog sites like this one, though Opinion Street includes the TPMs and Daily Kos' and The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight, and specialists in Investment or Finance, Law, and Public Policy.  How it is that people like what they like in this part of the Net is a tricky question. So, this seems like a good place to quote myself:
There were a large number of blogs I used to follow when it was a new phenomenon -- Hey, you can hang out there and pretty much say whatever you want! By now, as with any industry, for those bloggers who have continued providing analysis and entertainment to the Intertubes, they've developed into tribes, circles of mutually-supporting friends, each with their own sites.

Woe betide you if you bore them, piss them off, or are identified as a Troll. Commenting at their sites is a bit like appearing, the stranger, at someone's party and if you just don't quite fit in... Well, ostracization, 'Blackballing', 'freezing out'... is what it was once called; I believe the blogging term is they don't get to sit at the cool kids' table, and for the most part, that's pretty much the level [of] where it's at.

I don't try to sit at the kid's table; I'm not a concise or especially original blogger when it comes to social commentary or Left politics, and even when I make jokes as a commenter it's as if I'd made a bad smell in the room.

But, if acclaim as a blogger, or 'getting a name' as a commenter on other blogs is the reason why someone posts... That's the functional equivalent of going into acting just to read the reviews.
Und, Noch Eimal:
Some pundits with a large soapbox to stand on... deserve to be ignored, vilified; to have their IP addresses blocked and sent to dwell in the land of Little Rupert, East of Podhoretz...  but they won't leave. They won't perform a swan song -- a GBCW! post: Good-Bye, Cruel World!

...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, [or] 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 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... 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. 
 I'll get back with the three people and the super-intelligent Parakeet a little later.

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Friday, October 12, 2012

What Samuel L. Jackson Said

Great-Uncle Yehudi Reminds 
By I. Rabsckinsky


Look; American peoples. Let me be first to admitting, and to you, I am Socialist guy. I believe in all people not being in mud, in the cold, with Rich Guy pissing on them and giving them rubber Chicken Head to eat. That everybody should be having at least some of the Good, some of the Time -- like your President Guy Continental Lincoln says (Ha ha; okay, not so great this joke. But, still).

This is supposed to be Amerikanyets Way, okay? I am not thinking everybody, including my SmallChild 01 and SmallChild 02, will be growing up to be Billionaire. But I would like them to become larger Childs and ever Adult in place where you are being safe, and do not have to pay police guy to help you, do not have the complete food, and must be always very careful what you say to anybody. And have some Guy telling you to make prayers to Jesus Guy.

And, as Socialist Guy, I am pretty much believing all politicians are being corrupt. To be Bad, they don't mean; they want to do the Good. But somehow, with Big Boys from The Wall Street, and Big Jesus Guys and Crazy Fat White Guys Making With The Radio, Amerikanyets politicians do not listen to People. And because of the Money and The System, you have something rotten from inside, like bad Chicken Head in the jar when you buy from store.

 Great-Uncle Yehudi (In Front) In The Berlin; May 1945

I talk about with My Great-Uncle Yehudi. Now, is true that Uncle Yehudi is Old Guy, sleeps a lot and watches The Mister Ed on teevee and remembers 1942 better than 2002, sometimes. But he is also Smart Guy when he talks, and I like to listen except when he wants me to hit him with phone book until he falls down. But still we love him.

So, I ask Uncle Yehudi: Obama -- Goot Guy, Nize Guy, but is Political Guy, yes? So, corrupt! Even though the other guy, OvenMitt guy, is complete Capitalist ashole, Rich Guys will always give us Rubber Chicken Head forever, no matter how we are voting. So why be doing anything? And Yehudi sits up in Barcalounger chair, turns off vibrating MagicalFingers, and looks at me.

"There are times," Yehudi says, "When I think you are guy who gets hit with phone book too much. But this is what it is like to be young.  To be so stupid -- that I remember.

Great-Uncle Yehudi Today, Without Book Of The Phones

"In Great Patriotic War," Yehudi said, "We had two kinds Commander. One was Guy who, when you are making attack, he was someplace else -- always, safe. He speaks to you like a man beats his horse, like you are deaf guy. He kisses ass of the Political Officer -- and when you are in the trouble only stood up for you, maybe, sometimes." Yehudi points finger at me. "In life, bubchick -- be Guy. Don't be that Guy."

"Then there was other kind Commander. He talks like you are Guy, he is Guy; okay. In the attack, he is up front, with you! Not 100%, but maybe ninety, ninety-five per cent of the times. And that, you notice. The Political Officer he agrees with, but the ass of that Stukach, he doesn't kiss. And when you are not making the trouble, but the trouble finds you anyway? This kind Commander stands up for you.

"I have forgetting more things than I ever knew," says Yehudi. "But I can smell this guy, OvenMitt Guy; he is just Rich asshole Clown Guy. When attack comes, he will be someplace else. And always, always he is kissing the Political Officer's ass. He never stands up for you -- who are you? To OvenMitt, you are not Guy -- you have no money! You are just 'That Guy'.  And this is who the Americans want for their Presidential?"

"You are Amerikanyets Guy, now, also," I remind him.

"Don't interrupt," he says. "And that little Guy with the big ears who is with him -- he will make you to go live in street, while they sell your furniture and hand you Rubber Chicken Head. OvenMitt guy is just Clown in circus -- he is the one they make you watch, while others you don't see take your house and money -- like the Little Guy." Yehudi makes face like someone squeezes his cheeks. "Him, I've seen all my life -- Poland, Moldova; America -- always, the Little Guy.  Is the same guy."

OvenMitt Guy Says: Suck On Rubber Chicken Head

"So, what should we do?" I am asking.

"Listen to me. Isidore, you are my favorite Great-nephew. (I am only Great-Nephew, I tell him. "Again, he interrupts," Yehudi says.) You cannot make big change over the night. History does not work like this, unless you get Revolution, and even you know how good it worked last time. So you take the small change that is the Good. And you Hope. But to have The Good, you must fight -- not the revolutsya, but still, to fight. Otherwise, the Clown comes, and along with him, The Little Guy.

"This is the solution?" I ask him. "To be taking the little Bad?"

"Gottenu; Listen to me. Do you make everything work? When you are running the whole Earth, you can get to say. Having the Good Commander is sometimes the best you get. He is still part of System; yes. He is not Messiah; it is not the Heaven. But is better than finding one day that you lie in mud while Rich Guy pissing on you and selling Rubber Chicken Head.

 "This is what happened with Bush Guy! You remember -- Little Bush was Clown; Cheney Guy took away the furniture. So, finally, listen: It is better to live on your feet than to die on your knees."

I think. "What exactly is this meaning?" I ask.

"It means, the Cossacks come." Yehudi leans closer; he looks at me. "Wake The Fuck Up."

I, Rabschinsky, say this. To Moldavish Guy; you also.

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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Mongo, He Dead

Alex Karras, 1935 - 2012

 Alex Karras and Clevon Little, Blazing Saddles

Jostling among the ever-present crowd of patrons over at Sadly, No!, I noticed another comment downstream (Mongo dead. Host a cup of baked beans in his memory) and thought, Well What In The Wide, Wide World Of Sports Is This?

No joke. I actually used the Slim Pickens line -- presciently, as it turned out: Alex Karras, the progenitor of my persona, had died in Los Angeles; sadly, the New York Times reported Karras suffered from "kidney disease, heart disease and stomach cancer, his family said in a statement announcing his death, as well as dementia."

I've never been a big fan of football, and as a kid never knew or cared about Karras' minor gambling issues with the NFL and it's head, Pete Rozell, in the early 1960's.  I dimly remember seeing Karras, playing himself as a member of the Detroit Lion's team, in the movie Paper Lion -- but it was his Blazing Saddles character which left an impression both on me, and the crew I hung around with in my career as an undergraduate Dog
The name 'Mongo' (aber natürlich) comes from the mid-seventies film, Blazing Saddles, and was won by me after a night of drunken, smoky collegiate revelry that resulted in, uh, "an incident".  I was known to a small cadre of fellow-travelers as Mongo, A Dog, ever since.
 Said Incident involved one of two actual "blackouts" I've had in my life, and the now infamous Dog-versus-Vending Machine encounter, which found me waking up in the afternoon of the next day, my closet inexplicably filled with scores of various candy bars.

To stand looking at that much candy, and not have a clue where it came from was a moment of mind-bending, alternate-reality Wujo experience on a level with trying to comprehend even those few, barely intelligible paragraphs among the scribblings of Jonah Goldberg.

 I owe much to Mr. Karras; Now he knows what we do not. In part, he helped make me the Dog I am today, and I will always be grateful.  Go gently, and well.

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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

May They Put You Into General Population, Jerry

Jerry Sandusky, the soul of innocence, was sentenced to no less than 30, and no more than 60, years in a Pennsylvania State prison today on forty-five counts of child molestation.

Jerry, when asked the standard question by any Judge in such a hearing ("Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?"), swore to the court and the Saints and the Virgin that he didn't do anything and was innocent.

Yeah Right Okay; Jerry will spend his time in 'Segregation', separated from the rest of the prison's General Population --  meaning until they pull him into a prison hospital ward to die, he will spend most of every day locked in his cell. Because pederasts in prison have a target painted on them in neon letters, ten miles high:  
SHANK ME.

Well, we can dream. Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Jerry, you predatory, soul-destroying piece of trash.

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We Miss The Lobster

And Fafnir And Giblets Too

Miss them all.
Medium Lobster! There is no Lobster but He - the Living, The Self-subsisting, the Eternal. No slumber can seize Him Nor Sleep. His are all things In the heavens and on earth and under the oceans. Who is there that can intercede In His presence except as He permitteth? He knoweth What (appeareth to All as) Before or After or Behind them.
Nor shall they compass Aught of His knowledge Except as He willeth. His throne doth extend Over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth No fatigue in guarding and preserving them, For He is the Most High, The Supreme (in glory). He is Medium Lobster, the One and Only.

-- by Anonymous, at April 02, 2008 10:03 AM
 
You better get with the program.

 -- My Father, While Pointing At A Picture Of The Medium Lobster
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They Became What They Beheld

A Reprint, Kind Of

So, it looks like we're on track to a Mitzy and Paulie kind of America -- you know, where Mitzy calls you into his office and says, in a very matter-of-fact tone, that your service has been appreciated, and it's very very very hard to tell you this -- but America has to let you go.

It isn't that you did anything wrong -- necessarily; we're just moving in a new direction and have to reallocate; we have to lower our expectations today so we can aim for the stars later (not literally, or course; we can't pay for NASA any more).  But we just can't keep you on. Sorry.

Well, there's food stamps, Mitzy says; and Little Paulie grins that lopsided grin of his and says Nope. Oh Yeah Right, Mitzy says; we cut that program. And there's no unemployment insurance, either, Paulie adds helpfully. We cut that, too.

And it's nothing personal, Mitzy says; just the Business Of America.  He glances at his watch; mumbles something about "having a meeting in here in a few minutes", and with the envelope that contains your final check, Mitzy offers you a handshake. Because he's compassionate. He says Bye-bye, and adds, "I know you're going to be okay" -- but what he really means is Don't make a scene. Don't spoil my day.

And Little Paulie is the one who takes your badge and company phone and your desk keys -- before walking you to the elevator, where he gives you that soulful, Doe-eyed Altar-Boy look when he says good-bye... and just as the elevator doors start to close, you see the beginnings of that creepy smile creasing his face. The doors close; you're fired.

Welcome to Mitzy and Paulie's America.

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Here's a reprint of a post from August of 2010, which sketches the kind of Volk that are waiting for Mitzy's election, the kind of person who will be ascendent in the Mitzy's New America.

You already know them. They were riding high while we lived under eight years of Lil' Boots, their know-nothing, proud-of-his-ignorance, stuff rolled-up socks in his crotch wartimey leader. The kind of person who tried to play a guitar, and ate a birthday cake, while bodies floated face-down in the flooded streets of New Orleans, and his mother chuckled about how well things had worked out for the peasantry.

A place where the extremely wealthy, hidden behind smoked glass in limos and gated estates, run things through political surrogates and lobbyists, while the peasantry are manipulated through the miracle of Little Rupert's NewsCorp and the caperings of jesters like Lard Boy or Little Glenn Beck.

It will be a place of Austerity, where unemployment maintains a pool of desperate contract workers, ready to do anything to be able to eat. It will be an America of shabby cities which can't afford road repair or clean streets -- and plenty of poor and homeless, because State governments will be responsible for allocating what assistance there is. Republican Governors like Little Scottie Walker will make sure only crony conservatives and non-union shops deserving.programs receive funding

PBS may still be around -- in a reduced form, and with more programs funded by individual donors -- like Little David Koch, who will want to see less of Big Bird or shows about FDR, and more ten-hour documentaries about Ayn Rand by Dinesh D'Souza. And The News Hour (never very balanced to begin with) will more resemble Fox and Friends.

It will be an America where Roe v. Wade may as well have never existed, and a place where textbooks, part of education "modules" created by a News Corp subsidiary, tell children the sun revolves around the earth, which is only 6,000 years old, and teach them about heroic conservatives in our wonderful country's fabled past. And there will be prayer; lots of prayer. And lots of money for the Megachurch pastors, too; but that's just a sign of god's favor.

That's the America waiting for you. And the people in the post below are the kinds who will run it -- not lead, but manage -- because Mitzy's America will be handled more like a business, and not like a nation.

And the most interesting thing about these leaders in waiting is that they don't just hate the different lifestyles, or politics, or opinions which other people have. They hate the people who have those differences.

It isn't just about differing ideas.  They hate the people ... you should think about that.

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Red Land
August, 2010

Dinner With Bill, Sean, Mikey, Glenn, And Zeppo

A very mildly liberal christian friend, who had spent most of her formative years in Texas, just returned to California after a visit there, feeling bewildered and a little frightened.

At a restaurant dinner with the family of a close childhood friend, people around the table began questioning her about living in "that California": Wasn't there a lot of crime? Wasn't all that gay marriage stuff just terrible? So against god? What about "your illegals"; didn't she think we should do something about that?

Most of the people around the table had known my friend for at least a decade as she grew up in Texas and went to college. They lived in the same neighborhood. Their daughter and my friend have remained close over the twenty-plus years since; my friend is not a stranger to these people, and they're aware she's a christian.

My friend has also been unemployed for more than a year, raising three teenagers as a single parent, slowly spending her savings. She had nervously spent money to travel with her eldest son to see him ready to attend college this Fall (which he could do only because he had received a scholarship). Everyone at the table knew all of this, too.

She was a little nonplussed by their questions about California, and tried to answer noncommittally -- but it seemed that asking her these questions was just the family's way of introducing topics to monologue over:

>> Obama is "turning the country socialist", and "wants to build that mosque"; "Somebody should do something."

>> Obama "is Muslim";

>> Many people on long-term unemployment are "lazy", and any extensions of benefits are just "coddling" them;

>> One of the women around the table told my friend Europe will be overrun by hordes of Islamists while the rest of the world stands by, paralyzed by liberal softness: The woman had been reading America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, a book by Rightist author Mark Steyn published in 2006. (Little Rupert's Fox hearts Steyn and his book.). In all seriousness, the woman told my friend, "He [Steyn] is the finest writer I've ever read";

(My friend [who had married a man from Jakarta, Indonesia, and has lived and worked abroad] asked the people around the table if they had traveled in Europe; the father in the family replied, "I've never been outside the United States".)

>> The threat of illegal immigrants is very real -- "They think Texas and the Southwest is still their land, and they'll try taking it back if we don't do something," a man said.
My friend had sat uncomfortably at the table, and said little in response. Finally, the grandmother in the family stood up, looked archly at my friend and said (as if it were a rebuke), "Yesterday I went to my first Tea Party meeting" -- then abruptly walked out of the room.

My friend has a number of health issues, and takes several medications (currently paid for through an expensive COBRA plan, which she will lose as it's too expensive), and one side effect is a decreased appetite. The father in the family paid for everyone's meal; when handing the bill and a credit card to the waiter, he turned to my friend and said, "S'that why you didn't order any food? 'cause you don't have any money?" And, he was in no way kind when he said it.

What dismayed and frightened my friend was how angry her friend's family seemed. "I'm not all that liberal, but the more they talked, the angrier they got -- I was from California, so to them I had to be some kind of hippie radical.

"What was really frightening was their ignorance," my friend told me. "They weren't thinking for themselves; they didn't want to listen to anything except the kind of right-wing radio junk they were regurgitating."

Remember: Most of the family around the table had known my friend for at least a decade as she grew up and went to college. Their daughter and my friend have remained close in the twenty-plus years since; my friend is not a stranger -- but these people went out of their way to demean and insult her over perceived and assumed matters of ideology.

They thought she was a "California liberal", and treated her according to their own code of conduct. My friend, committed to her faith, did not protest. That would not have been my choice of response.

As she recounted what she'd heard said around the table in a public restaurant, my friend also remembered these people kept repeating phrases like, if we don't do something... somebody needs to do something... we'd better do something.

I have a very, very bad feeling about the future.

(NOTE: This post was edited on August 20, 8:07AM PDST)