We don’t have enough righteously angry people here on the internets. Oh, sure, we’ve got a surplus of screaming ravers and foaming polemicists, but real Swiftian anger is a bridge too far for most of us, most of the time. It’s damned hard work, and you wouldn’t believe the pay. I’ve been trying and failing …
Doghouse Riley Will Be MissedPost + Comments (27)
…The GOP hasn’t “moved from the mainstream”. It’s gained more power. The “center of power” hasn’t gone much of anywhere. It may have followed Goldwater West and South, thanks to the evil genius of Nixon, but it’s not exactly a seismic shift from Joe McCarthy to Jesse Helms, from John Wayne to Glenn Beck. When th’ hell was it Chuck Hagel’s party? When was it Nelson Rockefeller’s, for that matter? They called Truman a commie, for chrissakes….
Okay, sure: the Republican party has become increasingly dilatory and obtuse in the halls of power, but that’s not a change of the last four years. Had Republicans had the power in 1981 they would have dispensed with all the Reagan sainthood bullshit and just rammed through their radical agenda, instead of getting Democrats to agree to do it for them. And there’s no question this has been facilitated, both by a venal and cowardly Democratic party, and a venal and cowardly Press. But, really, enough of this stuff. I’m not gonna make common cause with Democrats, or rueful Republican centrists, who suddenly notice what the GOP has become, and expect a medal for saying so. The time to speak up was thirty years ago, when this stuff was just as plain, and was being covered by a transparent rewrite of unpleasant history, and a clear retrenchment on individual rights. Y’know, when Reaganism was the Wave of the Future the Republican platform had no more chance of actually governing than it does today. David Stockman was just as big a liar as Paul Ryan. I’m going to settle for having been right about this shit all along, and hope we don’t kill too many innocents when it all blows up. Don’t offer to help me shovel now. You’ve already done enough.
…[T]here is a large, relatively well-remunerated employee type in this country known as “sales personnel” whose salaries are largely contingent on how much money they bring in for their bosses. There’s your comparison to what has happened to [baseball] player salaries over the past thirty, forty, or sixty years. Media revenues exploded. The Reserve Clause was overturned. Cable television gained, with an assist from the Rehnquist Court, the same sort of anti-trust protection that Major League Baseball has had for over a century, so that a cable system has, say, a billion fucking dollars to throw at the Dodgers. In 1946 the average player’s salary ($5000, 1946 dollars) was 0.2% of the value of his franchise. In 2011 it is 0.5%. That’s not astonishing exponential growth. It’s the power of collective bargaining, aided by a changing legal status (and blocked by collusion for most of the 80s) to gain a more equitable distribution of revenues which depend entirely on the players. Nobody goes to the ballpark to see an owner. Except maybe Slate writers. Well, and Reason.
Worst Video Game Ever. Figures.
• Run for governor of Texas, or move to an island and found your own colony of Jebus-mazed explosion fanciers?
• Fakey Texas drawl, or Cagney impression?
• Run for President, or do something for your country for once?…
HERE’S the thing about D’ines’h D’Souza: he found himself a nice little sinecure in America defending the Raj. That comes with a price, of course. Not in swallowing the understandable anger and disgust the Anglo-American Man’s Burden must engender in its erstwhile subjects; that sort of thing seems to go down easy with second or fifth-generation mandarins. It’s just that, inevitably, someone with D’Souza’s rh’torical gifts has got to figure (and rightly so) that These People Are Dumb As Stumps, and go looking for further fields of plunder.
Lacking Hitchens’ gifts, D’inesh had to settle for life as a Toolbelt to the neocons, and pan for gold among the evangelical dross, jettisoning his Catholicism somewhere along the way. Sorta. (Again, fortunately for D’Souza, in those circles one can now be a best-selling Christian apologist without taking sides on the Reformation, which has apparently been relegated to the intellectual dung pit alongside the Trinitarian debate, the question of translation, and the George W. Bush administration….
“It can’t be stressed enough: the modern garbage disposal is not powerful enough for human remains.”