As a result of a recent injury, fashionable anorexic and professional prevaricator Ann Coulter has had her jaw wired shut.

There is a God…

Embassy (n): The place of residence of a political appointee who has been sent to a country of which he does not speak the language or might previously have not been able to accurately locate on a map, for the purposes of furthering the interests of the corporate campaign donors of the Republican party.
The current American embassy in Baghdad, which was completed in late 2007, is the largest, most expensive embassy U.S. has ever built, the complex costing $1.3 billion and covering some 104 acres. (by comparison, the Pentagon covers 29.) It boasts its own private water treatment and power plant, and also features such things as a food court, gym, swimming pool, movie theatre and “American Club” bar to cater to the needs of its almost 1000 staff who will are defacto prisoners within its walls. Of the aforementioned 1000 diplomats and personnel, the grand total of those who are fluent in Arabic currently stands at 6. It’s good to see that the Bush administration had its foreign policy priorities in good order.

Fear (n): (1) The feeling that inculcates a Right Winger when contemplating the possibility of a Democrat in the White House. (2) After Debt, the principle cash crop of the Bush Administration. Fear is necessary to maintain in the hearts of the electorate as a necessary adjunct to electing Republicans, who as we all know, are tough on terrorism as opposed to Democrats who will make your daughters fellate bin Laden. To this end, heightened terror alerts were usually issued just before mid-term elections. Fear is essential when attempting to convince the voters that the only way to prevent Al Qaeda from bombing the local 7-11 is to gut the Constitution.
The things we are being told to fear are largely creations of the very government from which it claims only they can protect us. The things we should legitimately fear – the continued insecurity of our ports, airports, chemical and nuclear plants, the incompetence of FEMA, the encroachment of abrogating our Constitutional rights for the shibboleth of security, etc, - were also due to the actions (or more accurately, inactions) of the self-same administration. This situation does not seem to create in any Rightist a sense of irony. Roosevelt once said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Right Wing Republicans have been jumping out of dark alleys yelling “Boogeda, boogeda!” ever since.

Killing Your Health care for Political Gain

Almost 50 million Americans have no health care. That’s roughly one sixth of the entire population. And yet the Repugnican Right Wing has always maintained that universal health care is beyond their capability. (Many of their own personal health care plans include Viagra which takes care of another thing beyond their capability.) However, President-Elect Obama has stated that initiating a “single-payer” national health care system is one of his foremost concerns. Naturally, this has the Right Wing frothing at their publicly-feed pie-holes.

Norman Markowitz, who is a contributing editor for PolticalAffairs.net, has noted that historically, citizens who look to the government as their primary health care provider have a tendency to change their politics. He cites as an example Britain after WW II when the Labour Party introduced the National Health Service, after which lower income, religious and normally conservative-bent people were more inclined to change their vote from the Conservative to the Labour Party.

One of the arguments put forth by commentator James Pethokoukis at U.S. News and World Report has taken the Markowitz piece to heart, noting:

“The GOP strategist had been joking about the upcoming presidential election adn giving his humouros assessments of the candidates. Then he suddenly cut out the schtick and got suddenly scary serious. “Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government health care plan, that’s it. Game over. Government will dominate the economy like it does in Europe. Conservatives will spend the rest of their lives trying to turn things around and they will fail…”

Well golly-gosh, darn them big-government tax-and-spend Socialist Democrats anyways….

Give me a break. The current lamentable Bush administration has stuck the U.S. with the biggest government in history together with the largest debt and a recession largely due to the fact that they are Don’t-Tax and Spend-Spend-Spend party totally in the hire of Corporate America. If you wanted to know what color of shoes the CEO of Halliburton was wearing today all you’d have to do was look at Dubyas tongue. But I digress…

Pethokoukis continues: “Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cat Institute, who first found that wonderful Markewitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog quote: Blocking Obama’s health care plan is key to the GOP’s survival.” (emphasis mine)

OK - so let’s just stare at this for a moment. In essence, what this little newt is saying is that in order for the Repugnican Party to survive, health care reform that would give those 48 million-plus uninsured the health care they need will have to be killed, else voters might believe they owed something to the Democrats and start voting for them in greater numbers. Universal health care is, of course, Socialist. And we all know that if that happens, fascist dictatorship is right around the corner. Obama - brown skin, fascist - brown shirts - come on, people! Michell Malkin says it could happen. What more do you want?

I can see why the Repugs are running in fear of the possibility of universal health care administered by the government. This goes against the entrepreneurial free-market economy that is the basis of the American system. After all, who do you want deciding what kind of health care you get? Some government bean-counter, or some corporate HMO bean-counter? Where’s the spirit of free enterprise and rugged individualism where one pulls one’s self up by one’s own jack-boot straps? Like the banks who wisely chose not to continue extending loans so they could use the taxpayer’s money to take over other banks? Or the auto industry rattling their begging bowl for a piece of your weekly paycheck so they don’t have to change their successful business plan - that of building large inefficient vehicles no one wants anymore?

The fact is that 40% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical care expenses. And one can only speculate how much is lost to the economy each year through illness that might have been prevented had it been addressed in a timely fashion. Congressmen get their health insurance paid for by you. Corporate executives get theirs paid for by the investors. Now some right-wing p__s-ant is seriously suggesting that in order for the Republicans to have any future relevance, they must kill Universal Health Care from the get-go because otherwise, more people might vote for the Democrats.

Suffer the little children, indeed… What, as Right Wingers are so fond of asking, would Jesus do?

To paraphrase the late Hunter S. Thompson, if the GOP lives, then something far, far better has died.

After about five years of being Monsanto’s top Washington lobbyist, in 2001 Linda Fisher was appointed by Bush as Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which - and I am sure this was entirely co-incidental - has authority over genetically altered plants. At roughly the same time, another Monsanto employee, Margret Miller, a leading researcher was given a position in the FDA by the Bush admiinistration. Prior to her leaving Monsanto for the FDA, Ms. Miller had submitted a report to the FDA to determine whether or not its artificial sex hormone additive in milk was safe. Her first job at the Food and Drug Administration was to give official approval to the report which herself wrote on behalf of Monsanto. Amazing as it may seem, she approved her report.
Finally, deciding whether or not Monsanto’s milk containing artificial growth hormones should have to be labeled as such, fell to another ex-Monsanto lobbyist, Mark Taylor, now (also co-incidentally) a newly appointed official in the FDA. He decided that it did not.
I tell you, it is a load off my mind that the Bush administration was so diligent in ensuring the health of America by appointing such expertise to positions of authority.
As a matter of fact, “a load” is indeed the best way to describe it…

Doubt (n): The anathema of Rightist thought since it implies that one might be wrong. Doubt was once defined by the author and intellectual John Ralston Saul as “the space between reality and the application of an idea.” This too is antithetical to Rightist dogma which defines true leadership as boldly acting upon a problem, not wasting valuable time by the navel-gazing unmanly process of analysis. This may often render disastrous results, however it has been long recognized that those making the decisions (AKA: the “Deciders”) never suffer the more severe consequences of an imprudent or untimely decision such as death.

Failure (n): Someone who can’t be allowed to succeed, ergo, a Democrat. A Democratic president fails when he is unable, in his first six months of office, to undo the economic and foreign policy depredations wrought upon the nation by the previous eight years of Republican mismanagement and incompetence. A Democrat may also be deemed a failure if his personal life doesn’t include a wealthy and influential family who’s job it is to bail him out periodically and send him from one sinecure to another, or to have suckled off the public teat all one’s life. George W. Bush is an example of the first, Senator Phil Gramm, (he of the famous “nation of whiners” and “mental recession” quote while shilling for the McCain campaign) an example of the second. George W. Bush, prior to being appointed President, once ran an oil company that was unable to find oil in Texas. Phil Gramm lost all his investment money in the porn movie business. One might think that oil and pornography are two venues in which it would be almost impossible to lose money, but Mssrs Bush and Gramm managed. (Gramm’s career of misadventure continued when he set the groundwork for the sub-prime mortgage and foreclosure debacle by slipping, at the behest of Enron lobbying, his “Commodity Futures Modernization Act” into a Congressional omnibus spending bill just prior to the 2000 summer break. The extent of George W. Bush’s accomplishments are yet to be fully appreciated.) These examples, in Republican vernacular are not, however, deemed to be failures. One simply experiences some “bad luck” from which one gains “valuable personal buisness experience.” After such experiences it was clear to Bush and Gramm that their future career choices were limited to politics or prostitution, and prostitution didn’t have a dental plan.

Denomination (n): A term that describes and differentiates which interpretation of the One and Only Eternal Truths one subscribes to. These include but are not limited to: Presbyterians, Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Unitarians, Presbyopians, Fundamnmentalists, the the Free-falling Church of Pentatechnicalities, etc. However, Republicans of the Right Wing persuasion, in a demonstration of true egalitarianism, only recognize one universal set of denominations. They come in tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds.

Enemy (n): Those who hate us because of our freedoms and would destroy our way of life, hence, their motives are unknowable and their tactics unforeseeable. Or at least that’s what was being put forth in the wake of the horrendous World Trade Centre attack. In reality their motives were entirely understood, (having been spelled out plainly by bin Laden) and their tactics were known to not only U.S. intelligence agencies prior to 9-11 but to the intelligence agencies of at least six other countries that warned of the possibility of an upcoming attack. However, it is always in the interests of the Right Wing that enemies be always painted as totally evil, utterly implacable and fortuitously omnipresent, especially prior to elections.
Fortunately for Right Wing politicians and political theorists, there will never be a time in the foreseeable future when there won’t be someone that can be defined as an
enemy. The PNAC document crafted by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol and others who were instrumental in planning the invasion of Iraq, have made the definition of any potential future enemies quite clear. After all, the PNAC manifesto is, in its own words, a “blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. (emphasis author’s) Furthermore, to facilitate this, the U.S. must “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars” so that the “American grand strategy” might be advanced “as far into the future as possible.”
Therefore, we have a conclusive definition of what the Right Wing might consider an enemy: any group or nation that is opposed to American interests, be they political or economic. There was great fear and consternation amongst the Right Wing after the fall of the former Soviet Union that there might be no further justification for pork-barreling in the defense industry. It appeared that they had temporarily forgotten that the defense industry has long since been in the business of creating weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist, and consequently should not have fretted. Besides, with the ability to create an enemy out of anyone who won’t sell us their oil or buy our products, and with the invasion of Iraq having increased terror attacks world-wide by 607 %, it is unlikely that we will want for enemies in the future. Halliburton, Boeing, Blackwater, et al, may rejoice in the knowledge that free enterprise and the Right Wing American way shall not perish from the earth.
Finally, there is also the fact that the Bush Administration has commissioned a Halliburton subsidiary to build detention camps inside the U.S., the Pentagon’s TALON program is compiling a list of anti-war protesters and the Bush had himself the right to suspend the Habeus Corpus and Posse Comitatus Act. Since the PNAC document’s “American principles and interests” could be legitimately defined as the principles (such as they are) and interests of the Bush Administration, one might be tempted to paraphrase Pogo. They have met the enemy and he is us.