Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Their freedom requires your slavery.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

75% of people clapping liked the show!

You are here: Home / My old school

My old school

by | 161 Comments

This post is in: 

I somehow became Facebook friends with the school nurse from my old K-12. My mom always said she was a winger, but I was surprised when she shared this link:

America has gone from being annoyed with their government to the point of resisting their government. In my previous article, I have detailed how state governors, veterans, truckers and just average everyday citizens are resisting the tyrannical and egregious abrogation’s of the United States Constitution. The police state crackdown mechanisms are in place which are designed to break the back of any resistance to federal authority, legitimate or not.

The net effect of the establishment of “Police State America” is that it is designed to subjugate the populace and stamp out any remaining vestiges of Constitutional liberties and create a society where the state is all-powerful. With America’s new found spirit of civil liberty being expressed through acts of civil disobedience, martial law is being put into place. When one couples this undeniable fact with the fact that President Obama is under extreme pressure and is struggling to maintain control of the country, these measures are going to be rolled in a style reminiscent of the Shock and Awe style witnessed in Gulf War I.

When I see things like this, I thank Jah that the median for a Fox viewer is 70. If they were younger, we’d have a real domestic terrorism problem, I’m afraid.

Reader Interactions

161Comments

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    I think one of the Fox News sore spots (that they keep pushing) is that is truly is a different world for someone who is now 70.

    As my grandmother explained, when she got married during the Depression, “bread was a nickel a loaf!” So no wonder she got sticker shock all the time.

    The world really has changed. In most ways, my grandmother celebrated that. It’s really too bad so many others cannot.

  4. 4.

    trex

    The word “abrogations” is plural, not possessive, and therefore does not require an apostrophe.

    True patriots know their grammar.

  5. 5.

    raven

    I’ve been pretty fond of talking about how shit were as bad, or worse, in the late 60’s and early 70’s but I’m starting to wonder. Maybe it’s the proliferation of social media and it just seems nastier because we only dealt with conflict face to face. I have little tolerance for any of that shit anymore, especially on FB. I’ve bagged family members and people I go back with over 40 years. I dunno.

  7. 7.

    aimai

    @trex: She was the school nurse, though, not a teacher. That did leap out at me too but then I just asked myself what was more important–the outright treason and paranoia or the writing and I gave up.

  8. 8.

    gogol's wife

    abrogation’s

    apostrophe fail

    Sorry, I’m teaching a writing course. That’s the only thing I can see up there. The rest is invisible (thank God).

  13. 13.

    Hal

    @WereBear:

    I think one of the Fox News sore spots (that they keep pushing) is that is truly is a different world for someone who is now 70.

    Every once in awhile I still see those gas was 1.60 in 2008 when Bush was still President. I never scoped out the age of the driver, but it would be interesting to see the age spread.

  14. 14.

    aimai

    @scott (the other one): I am *very* surprised we haven’t had another Oklahoma City. And even more surprised, and grateful, that we haven’t had any –oh, hell, I’m too superstitious even to say it–more direct attacks on the President and his family. These people have left sanity a long way behind.

  16. 16.

    gogol's wife

    OT but not really. I noticed in the story about the incident with the stenographer who started ranting on the floor of the House about Freemasons last night that the congresspeople were very rattled by the apparent security breach, and a Republican representative said, “What if she’d had a letter opener?”

    Oh, how terrible for you that you have to worry about crazed letter-opener-men while the rest of us have to sweat the Bushmasters.

  17. 17.

    catclub

    You know how ‘in my pants’ makes any movie title better? Well, [in their imagination] makes everything a little more accurate:
    “I have detailed how state governors, veterans, truckers and just average everyday citizens are resisting the tyrannical
    [in their imagination]”

    is just one example in that passage. I bet you could find six without breaking an apostrophe.

  18. 18.

    scott (the other one)

    @aimai:

    Yup. I too am very, very pleasantly surprised about that. I wonder if, for all Fox and Rush rile them up, it really is the opiate of the masses—sure, they’re all kinds of upset, but actually getting up and out doing something is just so damn much trouble when they can always get their outrage fix from Hannity.

  20. 20.

    PsiFighter37

    I think the wingers are going to start losing their marbles more publicly and more frequently. The stenographer shouting some weird shit about the Masons was only the beginning.

  22. 22.

    catclub

    @Hal: “those gas was 1.60 in 2008 when Bush was still President.”

    You know the present gas prices have been falling for the last 2 months or more, because nobody is bringing it up
    (but me).

  23. 23.

    Skherl

    I was born in 1951 so I’m 62 years old. My question is do I go bat shit crazy at a certain age or am I OK since I was born after 1950?

  24. 24.

    Suffern ACE

    @Hal: god. Gas was suddenly 4.00 in 2008 and then….something happened. Some really bad things happened. To people who were working. The folks who weren’t working and had paid off their mortgages years ago were probably happy about that. Plus they got two special COLAs in their social security thanks to congress that weren’t warranted by declining prices. Don’t push that “who has suffered more during this recession” button.

  26. 26.

    aimai

    @scott (the other one): Well, that is also very true. Its sort of the normal problem of the crowd. Since, as far as the letter writer is concerned, action is already being taken by thousands of other people (truckers!) she probably doesn’t feel like she needs to do anything other than forward email alerts and FB pictures of kitty truckers with guns.

  27. 27.

    ruemara

    Um, I forgot the museum, but there was already one silver freedom fighter who’s killed people. Don’t get cocky, kid.

    OT: Trying co-ordinate my cats flying back East with the ex is yet another continual exercise in “that’s why you’re an ex”. Christ. Fucking hire me someone so I don’t have to let them go with this twit.

  30. 30.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    the tyrannical and egregious abrogation’s of the United States Constitution.

    Which are so obvious we just sputter when anyone asks us what they are, amirite?

  32. 32.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Skherl: FWIW my parents have been nuts for years – ever since I’ve known them as a matter of fact; they aren’t Republicans or anything shameful like that – they are just nuts. The are lefties and in their early 70s. As a matter of fact, Mom’s birthday is tomorrow – I suppose that means she is a couple of days younger than Cole’s mom.

  35. 35.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Good grief. If only Barack Obama was the vile tyrant these people thought he was, we wouldn’t have to read this crap, because they’d all be cooling their heels in FEMA detention camps awaiting “resettlement” to North Dakota or something.

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @WereBear:

    The world has changed so dramatically and quickly in the last 40-50 years, and because of technology, we can all see it happen in real-time. I can almost forgive some folks for being frightened and reactionary.

  40. 40.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I was smoking with the boys upstairs when I heard about the whole affair.

    Just sayin’.

  43. 43.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @trex:

    The word “abrogations” is plural, not possessive, and therefore does not require an apostrophe.

    Damn fuckin’ straight.

  51. 51.

    schrodinger's cat

    @raven: I have been bitten twice by my cats, both times it was because they were scared and it was an instinctive reaction, both times the wound got infected pretty badly. Cat bites can be nasty.

    ETA: You should share pictures of the bitey kitty.

  52. 52.

    GRANDPA john

    @Hal: HEH, and where I lived, gas was 0.27 cents a gallon when Ike was prez. and the average wages was 50 cents to a dollar per hour. so from Ike to Bush there was roughly a six fold increase. The point of course is that there is no point to be made by any their irrelevant bullshit comparisons

  53. 53.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WereBear: These folks tend to worry about inflation a lot. One reason is entirely rational: they’re on fixed incomes, so inflation would bite them hard. Another is just hazy memories of the 1970s.

    But a significant one is that, to them, the great horror of inflation is cumulative change over 50, 60 or 70 years making prices all out of whack from what they remember in their youth. Of course, in any real economic terms that means nothing; monetary units are arbitrary, and it’s the current rate of inflation that could be ruinous or benign. But to a person whose expectations about prices were set several decades ago, it makes the whole world seem hostile and unfamiliar, and the cumulative change seems an outrageous imposition.

  54. 54.

    Monty

    @aimai: Yes, well…

    Some reports this week cite unnamed Secret Service officials as saying that there have been more than 40,000 individual threats against Obama investigated by the Secret Service since he was elected in 2008.

    Some of those are via social media, where threatening posts often result in a Secret Service agent at the poster’s front door the next day.

    Regardless of the exact numbers, which are not released by the service, Obama is believed to be the most threatened president in U.S. history.

  55. 55.

    catclub

    @raven: I guess the short version is: These people really believe the world is closing in on them. They really believe that Obama is a socialist [left undefined] or a marxist. et cetera, et cetera.

    I keep wondering how do you deal with that kind of blindness. ( Various government programs are excoriated for creating dependency. Social Security and Medicare never show up on the list of evil programs of that sort.)

    I have not gotten to the end, actually, maybe they will have some useful ideas drawn from the abyss looking back at them.
    I will let you know. ;)

  57. 57.

    Karen in GA

    @raven: I enjoyed reading FDL during the Scooter Libby trial. Drifted away after that, before the term “firebagger” was coined. Hell, probably before the 2008 election.

  58. 58.

    raven

    @schrodinger’s cat: Yea and this little fucker was ferrel. I thought I’d already told you about it. We saw it run across the street and tried to catch it. My friend, the MD, stayed with it and soon came running to my house to clean the bites.

  59. 59.

    j

    That rant came from “The Three Stages of U.S. Martial Law” by paranoid wingnut Dave Hodges.

    https://www.google.com/#q=The+net+effect+of+the+establishment+of+%E2%80%9CPolice+State+America%E2%80%9D+is+that+it+is+designed+to+subjugate+the+populace+and+stamp+out+any+remaining+vestiges+of+Constitutional+liberties+and+create+a+society+where

    Alex Jones “Info-Wars” site started spreading it around, so now all of the Stormfront and KKK and survivalist (now they preferred to be called “preppers”) lunatic sites are sowing the seeds of all out civil war.

    Alex Jones is kind of a nutjob “sovereign citizen” flame thrower.

    http://planet.infowars.com/preparedness/the-three-stages-of-us-martial-law

    Other wingnut racist “there be scarrrrrry people out there” sites are forwarding it to their email lists.

    Here’s a youtube page that the “sovereign citizens” have conveniently put up so we can see what we are now dealing with.

    http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eat+lansing+soverign+citizen+pulled+over&oq=eat+lansing+soverign+citizen+pulled+over&gs_l=youtube.3…2709.18863.0.19322.42.42.0.0.0.0.105.1985.41j1.42.0…0.0…1ac.1.11.youtube.lnR4kOj6x54

    They are ALL NUTS! And they won’t be happy until another “War between the states” forces that Black man out of the White house.

  63. 63.

    jibeaux

    There’s a whole lotta crazy packed into there.

    So I don’t remember if this is open thread or not, but I”m going to try NaNoWriMo. Anyone done this before or trying it this year?

  66. 66.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @catclub:

    The problem with the entire “dependency” argument is that it reflects an ignorance of how human beings actually function. We ARE dependent on one another. It is damn difficult for us to survive as individuals, no matter what the illusion is these people have that they can. The fact that they form groups to whine about “dependency” indicates that their self awareness is non-existent. They lack the skills to analyze their own situation.

    SS and Medicare/Medicaid are people helping people, which they seem to think is OK on a very small scale, but if it extends beyond their tribe, it’s evil somehow.

    This entire mindset is just so head-banging on the desk stupid to stun the senses.

  67. 67.

    Betty Cracker

    @Skherl: My mom is 67, and she’s still a hippie. My dad is a year older, and he’s always been a wingnut. You just never know. (They’ve been divorced for ages, of course.)

  71. 71.

    Matt McIrvin

    @catclub:

    Social Security and Medicare never show up on the list of evil programs of that sort.

    Actually they do, but not by name: they’re called “entitlements” for the purpose of complaining that the other party isn’t getting serious about cutting them. If the other party takes the bait, that’s when you call them by name and complain that the other party is cutting them.

  76. 76.

    PsiFighter37

    Some asshole who classified himself as ‘libertarian’ and went to my college kept responding to my political FB posts with total nonsense.

    a) He lives in LA, so good luck flying your freak flag there
    b) I de-friended him, because I don’t even know who the fuck he is

    It felt good.

    PF37 +a few glasses of white wine

  79. 79.

    Suffern ACE

    @Matt McIrvin: I find that quite humorous, actually, since the entire concept behind “entitlement” was so that the right could claim that those weren’t “welfare” for the undeserving. No those were somehow noble forms of welfare.

  80. 80.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Betty Cracker: My 84 year old father is the same Stephenson liberal he was when he cast his first presidential vote. My 80 YO mother is a pretty typical low-info voter– she was very upset about those poor WWII vets– but Nixon pretty much poisoned the Republican Party for her, and the Iraq War sealed the deal. Actually she remembers the Iraq War, which I guess makes her both a vulgar hippie and a rabid partisan by Village standards.

  84. 84.

    Betty Cracker

    @raven: There’s an ongoing battle in my little town over a growing feral cat colony. Some are mad at the people who feed them. Others are mad at the people who are mad that some people feed them. I’m not sure who’s right, but I am certain there are entire websites devoted to debating the issue!

  86. 86.

    dr. luba

    ” I thank Jah that the median for a Fox viewer is 70. If they were younger, we’d have a real domestic terrorism problem, I’m afraid.”

    I am friends with my high school chemistry teacher, who is now in her 80s (and a raging granny). She has told me, ore than once, that this country won’t make any real progress until her generation dies off. I fear she is right.

  87. 87.

    jenn

    @jibeaux: I love NaNoWriMo – my proto-book is non-fiction, though, so my goal word count/day is pretty low. I try holding my own monthly “contests” from time to time, but I have to admit, I find it more motivating thinking about all the other writer-wannabes working at being actual writers at the same time as I am!

  91. 91.

    Culture of Truth

    “America has gone from being annoyed with their government to the point of President blackey black black blackety black guy”

  93. 93.

    schrodinger's cat

    @SiubhanDuinne: It was one bite per kitteh, once when Inji was a kitten, she had climbed on top of a shelf and when she tried to get down, her paw was caught, I tried to pick her up and she latched on to me with her paws and her teeth. The other time my boss cat bit me when I tried to get between him and my neighbor’s cat who he was trying to attack for trespassing and was clearly in an attack kitteh mode.

  95. 95.

    Monty

    @jibeaux: If you’re prepared and maintain a decent word count through the first week, you should be able to cross the finish line. The entire affair is basically an endurance test; structure and discipline (not the sexy kind) is key.

  97. 97.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @j:

    That rant came from “The Three Stages of U.S. Martial Law”

    Sweartogod I read that as “The Three Stooges….”

  98. 98.

    IowaOldLady

    @Betty Cracker: So, I have a friend who teaches in Hong Kong for half the year and there are apparently lots of feral cats there. She belongs to this organization that catches them, sterilizes them, and releases them. Apparently this stabilizes the size of the colony. This group also feeds them and builds little cat houses for them. Well, cat houses, you know, not cat houses.

  99. 99.

    José Arcadío Buendía

    There hasn’t been another Oklahoma City, but there have been things like Democratic Party offices getting attacked, Unitarian churches being victims of shootings, and, you know, the whole Gabby Giffords thing.

  100. 100.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jibeaux: Nuts how? Nuts in the way that people are nuts. Odd quirks. Weird obsessions. My dad likes chick flicks. Mom did arithmetic problems for entertainment as a child. Dad loves to fish but doesn’t really like eating fish. Stuff like that.

  101. 101.

    Culture of Truth

    this undeniable fact with the fact that President Obama is under extreme pressure

    The man shits diamonds and still has time to humiliate the tea party.

  102. 102.

    TriassicSands

    Jeez, can’t wingers get anything right? Shock and Awe was not Gulf War I, but rather the 2003 invasion of Iraq by George “Mission Accomplished” Bush.

  103. 103.

    muddy

    @Betty Cracker: My town has a catch, fix and release program for them. Apparently if you just take them away, other cats will fill the spot. You need to leave them in place to hold the territory, but not breeding. There’s always *some* breeding of course, there is never a shortage.

  105. 105.

    Betty Cracker

    @IowaOldLady: There’s some talk about doing a catch and spay dealio to address our town’s cat colony issue as well, which sounds like a good idea. Of course, some people are advocating that the entire colony be wiped out. It’s fairly close to some businesses, and the cats get into their dumpsters and piss all over the place, which makes the merchants unhappy.

  106. 106.

    jenn

    @jibeaux: Another history of the (Euro-American) settlement of the American West. :*) It’s a little unfocused at the moment – at some point I have to narrow it down some, but I keep waffling about what I’m going to trim. I read an old letter about late 19thC divorces, Civil War era unmarried couples, women fighting to keep their job outside their home – but still having to be homemaker for 4 grown men, fighting with one set of Tribes, trading with another, etc, and start delving further – I can’t leave *this* out, I’ll leave *that* out — and then I run intot more information on *that*, and I can’t leave it out either! Little by little, though, it’s coming along.

  107. 107.

    muddy

    @aimai: I saw a clip of Foxnews on msnbc when that trucker thing didn’t happen. They interviewed one of the truckers, who said although all these people were talking about armed insurrection, he was a peaceful guy, and wanted it to be non-violent.

    “All what people?” I shrieked, frightening the animals. FFS.

  108. 108.

    trex

    @Monty:

    I spent some years as a moderator for the Washington Monthly blog Political Animal. We contacted the FBI more than once for threats against elected officials (Democrats, of course). The last time it happened a poster openly admitted that he met regularly with a group strategizing insurrection in the event of gun control legislation, and promised to kill a sitting Senator by name when the time came. That guy didn’t know to hide his IP address.

  113. 113.

    BobS

    @J.Ty: Jeff Baxter’s lead guitar on My Old School has always blown me away. I was both impressed and saddened when I learned about his second career as a missile defense consultant allied with right-wing dipshits like Dana Rohrbacher and Curt Weldon.

  114. 114.

    Bill D.

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Nope. Entitlement is a budget wonk term. It means programs where expenditures are determined by the legal entitlement of those receiving or newly applying for them, rather than by amounts appropriated each year. Welfare programs are by definition entitlements, as is Social Security. “Earning it” has nothing to do with whether the term applies.

    To bed now.

  115. 115.

    BruceFromOhio

    @trex: David, is that you?

    I was working with a group reviewing new software, and at one point one of the participants remarked, it’s amazing how we can sit here and watch the same demonstrations and see completely different things. The kicker is when we draw wildly disparate conclusions based on that observation.

    No wonder cops hate eyewitnesses.

  120. 120.

    Cassidy

    @jibeaux: I’ve tried before (writing), but I had a hard time getting started. Then I banged out some chapters and when I went back and re-read them I did t like them and felt embarrassed and deleted them. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t.

  121. 121.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cassidy: Hemingway would write pages and pages before he came to where he actually wanted to start the story. Part of it was fixing the characters, backstories, and all that in his mind. Once he finished the story, he would go back and trash everything that took place before the story “started.”

  122. 122.

    srv

    The net effect of the establishment of “Police State America” is that it is designed to subjugate the populace

    What that generation doesn’t understand is that just because they sat around and watched their kid’s hippy and civil rights peers get beaten by the establishment or die in Vietnam, doesn’t mean they got a pass. They got a layaway.

    I’m all for them getting what’s coming to them. Good and hard.

  123. 123.

    Cassidy

    @Omnes Omnibus: I think I felt like I was trying too hard and it didn’t feel real. I was a drama geek in HS and went to college originally to go to film school. I can see the scenes I want but have a hard time writing them.

  124. 124.

    fuckwit

    @Bill D.: We on the left get fucked by NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE EMOTIONAL AND PROPAGANDA MEANING OF LANGUAGE all the fucking time. I’m sick of being chumped. Lakoff ain’t the half of it.

    Horribly dangerous jargon terms that are stupidly (or deliberately?) chosen to mean the opposite of what they actally represent, and should never ever ever be used again:

    1) Entitlement
    2) Debt ceiling
    3) Cramdown
    4) Nuclear option
    5) Gun control
    6) Individual mandate
    7) School reform

    Probably a bunch more, but that’s just off the top of my head. Wonks are totally blind to the propaganda power of these words to completely fuck them in the ass, either chose them or let the right wing and corporate masters choose them, and then act surprised when they poll horribly or are generally accepted by most people to mean the opposite of what the wonks intended them to mean.

  126. 126.

    PsiFighter37

    @efgoldman: Ain’t just the olden days. One of my best friends encountered the situation at the end of last year where the lady he was dating casually became pregnant. I’m going out in a month to the Left Coast to see how him, his 3-month old son, and his (now?) wife are doing.

    I’m slightly freaked out because he had never planned on this, and I know personally, I’m not ready to have kids yet. Just a sign that we’re all getting older.

  127. 127.

    Tripod

    I remember the thirty-five sweet goodbyes,
    when you put me on the Wolverine up to Annandale….

    Generation Pb.

  129. 129.

    g

    You know there’s crazy and then there’s evil. There is something evil about whatever pack of charlatans decided the best way to make their money was to sow fear and paranoia among vulnerable people like this. Can you imagine how fearful an older person feels, hearing this crap? Can you imagine what their lives are like, in constant worry of an imaginary danger, while impoverishing themselves buying guns they don’t need, sending off donations, and making shaky investments because they’ve been thrown into fear by these grifters? How awful.

  131. 131.

    cmorenc

    @raven:

    I’ve been pretty fond of talking about how shit were as bad, or worse, in the late 60′s and early 70′s

    Well, if you were a male of draft age while the Vietnam War raged on, the potential to either get drafted or reluctantly recruited into one of the services as a way to have enough control over your destiny to avoid being sent to Vietnam, that factor constantly hung over your life like a loaded gun. You didn’t have a feasible option to postpone college or drop out for a year to get some life experience before returning with better maturity. When the draft changed to a lottery system and deferments were ended, the approaching day of the lottery draw for the age range that included your birthday was a nerve-wracking experience that could potentially turn your life course on a dime.

    You couldn’t escape it even by turning hippie and “dropping out” unless you could find a niche where you could hide from Uncle Sam or were willing to emigrate to Canada.

  132. 132.

    BruceFromOhio

    @g: Some, maybe most, but not all. DadFromOhio grew up in the cold war, did his time deferred from Vietnam building avionics for the MIC, and voted reliably Republican up through Bush I.

    He bought Oracle stock instead of guns, and laughed at the assholes buying gold in the run-up. REITs, he said, put your dinero in the REITs. Old codger is 74, still kicking it strong, and likes taking MomFromOhio on trips to Canada and the wine country. He’s no fan of Obama, but he’ll throw in with the Executive over the band of ijits running the clown car into the wall any day.

    And he thinks Scalia is an asshole, plain and simple. “How stupid do you have to be, to be on the Supreme Court?”

  133. 133.

    eemom

    @PsiFighter37:

    I’m slightly freaked out because he had never planned on this, and I know personally, I’m not ready to have kids yet. Just a sign that we’re all getting older.

    Nah. The sign that you’re REALLY getting older is when your college buds with early-twenties age kids pop up on FB with adorable newborns with wife #2, and you’re like, omfg, glad I’m a woman. Trust me on this.

  134. 134.

    mai naem

    IMHO, a lot of old folks vote for the GOP now because they live on fixed incomes and they really buy into the GOP crap about Obamacare/SCHIP/Welfare/Student loans taking money away from SS and Medicare. It isn’t that they don’t care about their kids/grandkids, they’re just scared shitless that they’ll end up broke in a nursing home on medicaid sharing a single room, and they all know somebody like that. It’s not like they can go out and work. $1-2K/mo in SS and a small pension does not go that far. I don’t agree with it, but I can understand how they see things.

  136. 136.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @cmorenc:

    I just found out that my dad’s very brief stint in the Army makes him “Vietnam-era” because it was in the late 1950s. He was too young for the Korean War and already out by the time Vietnam heated up.

  137. 137.

    FlipYrWhig

    @mai naem: they also buy hard into the idea that they and people like them have worked hard their whole lives, but Young People Today and, you know, Those People especially, they just want a handout, like their lazy-ass grandson who plays Car Thief all day and needs a haircut.

  139. 139.

    GregB

    Thank God none of these wingnut militia types will be able to stage a sneak attack anywhere. The whirring sound from the Lark scooters will give them away.

  141. 141.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @FlipYrWhig:

    They also buy hard into the idea that they and people like them have worked hard their whole lives, but Young People Today and, you know, Those People especially, they just want a handout, like their lazy-ass grandson who plays Car Thief all day and needs a haircut.

    They happens generation after generation. I am sure there some lungfish many years ago who were saying “Kids these days with their legs and their walking. In my day, swimming and flopping up onto land after bugs was good enough.”

  142. 142.

    Cervantes

    I somehow became Facebook friends with the school nurse from my old K-12.

    That there is the zeitgeist unmistakeable.

  144. 144.

    YellowJournalism

    My mom is the opposite of this nurse. Mom became more liberal as she got older, thank God. She and Dad love Maddow and support liberal causes like gay rights and marijuana legalization. They’re more liberal than my younger sibling, who is more likely to hang with the types who spout off Fox News crap or be glibertarians. (Sibling is still fairly left-leaning.)

  145. 145.

    Ruckus

    @Cassidy:
    A friend, was managing editor of a glossy monthly mag, gave me the best advice about writing I’ve ever gotten.
    Write. Write some more. Next, is never stop stage two.
    The real thing though is to learn to edit your own work like it is someone else’s. This is the key. The idea is in there you just have to learn to say it so that it sounds like what you’d like to read. My writing improved in so many ways. My typing on the other hand still sucks. I also find that I still have to write it down the idiot way and then edit the crap out of it.
    My problem right now is I had a complex novel started, which was lost when my last computer died. I can’t seem to get myself to start over. Oh well, good advice poorly practiced.

  146. 146.

    Ruckus

    @PsiFighter37:
    I’m old enough that if I had had kids when I was 21, and they had kids when they were 21, I could legally take my grandkids drinking. And I’m not old enough for Medicare.

  147. 147.

    karen

    I’m just happy that the Foxbot Teapublican voters will die of heart disease or diabetes from the unhealthy diet they fought for the liberty to have and/or cancer from the smoking they demand they have.

  148. 148.

    Betty Cracker

    @Ruckus: You could probably get that novel draft extracted from your hard drive — for a price. No idea what that would cost.

  149. 149.

    lou

    @mai naem:

    IMHO, a lot of old folks vote for the GOP now because they live on fixed incomes and they really buy into the GOP crap about Obamacare/SCHIP/Welfare/Student loans taking money away from SS and Medicare

    This. My senile racist 93-year-old grandma is so brainwashed by the Republican party that she genuinely thought Obama himself was after her. She got put into a home ASAP.

    @yellowjournalism: My dad is the same way. George W. Bush drove him over the precipice into liberalism. Unfortunately, my mother went in the completely opposite direction. She sits around at home and watches Fox 24/7 and has her car radio tuned to Limbaugh. She and her sister genuinely think Obama is Hitler. In fact, my aunt posted something equating Obamacare to the Holocaust and how the majority of Germans supported Hitler …so now they’re arguing democracy is bad?

  150. 150.

    Fred

    @Skherl: I’m exactly the same age as you and I’ve been bat shit crazy as long as I remember. Of course I’ve never taken over the podium at a public meeting, much less the floor of congress, and started ranting incoherantly or at least not to my recollection.
    If you start calling supermarket tabloids, ‘newspapers’ you should start to worry. Even I’m not that far off the charts. Yet.

  152. 152.

    Cassidy

    @Ruckus: Thanks. I’m not a very artistic or talented person in that regard do I feel weird trying it. But I think I’m going to give it another shot.

  153. 153.

    Liberty60

    @realbtl:

    the tyrannical and egregious abrogation’s of the United States Constitution.
    Which are so obvious we just sputter when anyone asks us what they are, amirite?

    Oh, but here are just a few!

    1. Wimmin are able to use their gummint health insurance to buy contraceptives- even though their husbands or bishops don’t want them to! Tyranny!
    2. Teh poors are bing given phones. PHONES, goddamit! Egregious!
    3. Job Creators on Wall Street are being disrespected- genuflection is not being given, fealty not sworn.
    4. Homos are getting married! Dogs and cats, living together!!1!
    5. The gummint is storing up billions of bullets to gun down real Americans. No, not the good gumint like the FB I and Army- no, its the bad gummint like the Social Security Administration!
    6. Ameros!
    7. Happy Holidays instead of Christmas.
    8. Drooppy drawers, hippity hop music
    9 Matlock is off the air.
    10. I have to press 1 for English.

  154. 154.

    Liberty60

    What is so fitting is that the school nurse is now a wingnut.

    Not just a nurse, but a school nurse. A member of the public education system created by Progressives, in a health care program championed by New Deal Socialists.

    Who is today enjoying a public pension, Social Security, or both, and Medicare benefits.

    Yeah. Preach us the gospel of rugged individuals, Grandma.

  156. 156.

    blueskies

    The thing is, a lot of what is in that missive is true…

    …if you’re a liberal.

    Think about how OWS was physically crushed in several major US cities. Peaceful participants were coralled, pepper-sprayed, beaten, tossed in jail, had Constitutional rights trampled on, etc., etc.

    There really is a police state, but it only shows up when one side is involved.

  157. 157.

    danielx

    Unfortunately, their concerns over civil liberties etc and general paranoia are not exactly unfounded. My friends and acquaintances who used to accuse me of being over-concerned about surveillance and the like are considerably less skeptical after the last few months of revelations about the NSA, DEA, ABC, DEF and christ knows what other alphabet agencies. That on top of decades of court decisions whittling away at the Fourth Amendment, negation of habeas corpus and so on and so forth. (“Free speech zones”, anybody?)

    However, the amendment they’re mostly concerned about is the Second Amendment, and if the other portions of the Bill of Rights were only held valid for the right kind of people (themselves) that would be fine by them.

  159. 159.

    Linnaeus

    @fuckwit:

    We on the left get fucked by NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE EMOTIONAL AND PROPAGANDA MEANING OF LANGUAGE all the fucking time. I’m sick of being chumped. Lakoff ain’t the half of it.

    Hell, you can go back to Plato on this stuff, at least in the Western tradition.

  160. 160.

    JustRuss

    @Liberty60: @Liberty60: Indeed. My mom was a school nurse, and thank FSM, quite liberal. But it’s one of the first positions to get cut when the school budget gets downsized due to tax cuts. I do wonder how the nurse in question is handling the “government workers’ pensions are too generous” issue. I’m guessing cognitive dissonance is involved.

  161. 161.

    mclaren

    @raven:

    I’ve been pretty fond of talking about how shit were as bad, or worse, in the late 60′s and early 70′s but I’m starting to wonder.

    No, things were much much much worse in American politics in the 60s and 70s.

    How many major American cities do you see today burning, with curfews due to riots, and national guard troops patrolling the streets?

    Zero.

    Back in the 1960s, that was a monthly occurrence.

    How many draft riots do you see today? How many national guard troops gunning down kids on campuses?

    None.

    Back in the late 60s and early 70s, that kind of thing was all over the news.

    How many demagogue sociopath presidents do you see eagerly using an insane counterproductive war (in which middle-class grad students are being drafted) to divide the country and reap political benefit?

    Not happening today. Back in the 1960s, Nixon tore the country apart and enjoyed vast political rewards for it.

    How many millions of Cambodians do you see getting napalmed today? How many crazed right-wingers do you hear on the radio advising bystanders to pick up rebars and beat antiwar protesters to death? How many major Democratic political leaders do you see today getting gunned down by crazed assassins?

    That kind of thing happened daily back in the 60s.

    No, the sixties was a special kind of hell. Those of you who think things are bad now wouldn’t have lasted a week back in 1968 before you crawled into a padded cell and begged for thorazine.

Comments are closed.