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Monday, January 7, 2008

On Fear

I should first start by apologizing for posting with less than daily frequency. As it turns out writing on for real politics, especially the US Presidential variety, is far more time consuming than mindless ranting which my blog is already overly thick with.

Researching and sourcing good hard data is no trivial task even with tools like Wikipedia and YouTube. But to the individual who posts JFK's inaugural on YouTube my sincerest gratitude, an entire nation of school children should watch your 14 or 15 minutes of rerun, they would be better served than the thousands of hours of "channel 1" paid in classroom programming.

Previously I discussed the Democrat Primaries and my hopes for BHO (Barack H. Obama). Today I would like to discuss the Yang to the Democrat Yin.

If you are old enough to read this you are almost certainly old enough to remember what you were doing in 1999 and 2000. I personally was a University of Waterloooo coop student in the Math Faculty doing my major in Computer Science. (Back in those days it was a department, not a School of Computer Science.) But returning to my topic, if you are old enough to have read this far you probably remember the US Presidential Elections of 2000. Recall there was that disaster in Florida where Al Gore got more votes, but because Fox news called Florida for Bush and the Supremes stopped the recount Bush "won" Florida, its 25 electoral college votes and thus squeezed buy with a razor thin, minority actually, more people voted for Gore than Bush.

But before what we will charitably call a fiasco in Florida, there was the Republican Primaries. Remember John McCain? Remember the straight talk express? The maverick former solider who had served in Vietnam, spent time (five years) in the Hanoi Hilton, had gone on to become a senator and a straight shooter, who said it as he saw it. He cleaned up in the New Hampshire Primaries and then disaster struck in South Carolina. What happened in South Carolina? Rat Fucking, pure and simple.

To understand Rat Fucking we must first remember George Walker Bush's former deputy chief of staff, one Karl Christian Rove. Well it turns out Karl had built up quite the portfolio of dirty tricks and campaign skulduggery. He had been at it from the days before the Nixon administration and had carried on with it right through, (I am sure we will find out) until his resignation just a few months ago. Karl, or Turd Blossom as POTUS Bush would sometimes call him, was a protege of Donald H. Segretti of Watergate infamy. Rove's mentor was one Harvey Leroy "Lee" Atwater who, on his death bed no less, would denounce his former practices of dirty tricks. (Tricks spelled out very nicely in the linked Wikipeida articles.) It's a shame Karl did not pay closer attention to Lee's dying words.

Well in the run up to the South Carolina primary Karl used Push Polling, "pollsters" would call up voters and ask questions like: "If you knew the John McCain had illegitimately fathered a child with a black woman would you be more or less likely to vote McCain?" Remember South Carolina was one of the states to succeed from the Union that comprised the United States, when threatened with an end to enslaving its black population. The straight talk express drove right over a cliff in South Carolina and was never seen from again.

You would think that after South Carolina, John McCain would give up politics and become an executive at some behemoth insurance or legal firm, like all good retired Republicans. But old John McCain outlasted the Hanoi Hilton, he was gonna outlast the Rove slugfeast by, well as it turned out, joining the fun! John McCain wasn't running no straight talk express no more.

So who is left? There is that model of old money Republican wealth Mitt Rommey who prides himself on being the CEO candidate. Sort of like a current President. Mitt didn't run any companies into the ground but he did run the 2002 Winter Olympics. There is crazy Christian conservative Mike. Beware any politician who calls themselves Mike. Michael is fine, but not Mike, those guys will gut your social safety net faster than you can say separation of church and state. Of course there is "America's Mayor" who appears to be physically incapable of stringing together a sentence that has a noun and verb, unless at least one of the above is the expression '9/11'.

Finally how to ensure that your gang of misanthropic curmudgeonly miscreants gets elected? Well, that's what Rat Fucking is for, now documented in a handy guide! Democrats, watch your walets, protect your wives, the barbarians are at the gates, and they wear dark suits with expensive watches! (And are physically incapable of human kindness, or even decency.)

An Aside:
In doing research for this post I came upon a really good link on the New York Times page. This link documents the Democratic Primary Calendar and this is for the Republican primary Calendar. Political junkies and those who are just curious, I would encourage you to read up, its a good lesson in civics, even if you are not American.

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