Beautiful Horizons

A Brief Rant

My God, is there anything more lazy in our discourse than the constant overuse of sports metaphors in conversation? I swear I think I'm going to flatten the next person who uses the term "slam dunk" when they mean certain.

The Limits of Hyperbole

A note to Ann Coulter, Hank Williams, Jr.and anyone else who bandies about the term Nazi with alacrity: It is not those you insult by calling them "Nazi" who suffer the most grievous harm, but it is those who actually suffered under these fascists: the millions of Jews, French, Danes, Dutch, Poles, Norwegians, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavians, Belgians, and British who suffered genocide, occupation, deprivations and countless humiliations during that era.

You trivialize their suffering by linking it to something that is not by even the stretching of hyperbole to its ad absurdum limits remotely similar. Shame on you.

Okay, I'm gonna go with Fox News (and The Daily Show) on this one...

The Daily Show
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Is Clarence Thomas the biggest beneficiary of "Weinergate" ?

Anthony Wiener has - to my knowledge and despite the insinuations by FOX News about "contact" with  underage girls - broken no laws but he's proven himself to have next to zero judgement for a high-profile politician, in emulating the behavior of an adolescent obsessed with his own privates on Twitter. 

The narcissism and hubris he displayed is as disturbing as the parallel public obsession with his pathetic and embarrassing activities in some absurdly assumed "private" domain. I think, given that he's opened up a Pandora's Box of publicity about his personal habits, he needs to resign and let the rest of us get on with our lives, as should he. 

But my distaste for Wiener's behavior is out-distanced by my disgust at his letting his private demons destroy some valuable political contributions he has made.  And I wonder whether the timing of Weinergate has anything to do with the fact that Memorial Day weekend he was using the same social media he abused as a...uh...horny jerk to push for an investigation of Clarence Thomas' ethics violations - violations that actually impact the integrity of the nation's highest court:  

What is already in the public record is shocking, to say the least, in that it involves potentially  20 years of violations of disclosure rules by Thomas, whose wife was bringing nearly $800,000 of income into their family home, unbeknownst to the public, while conducting very public advocacy on issues that are sure to come before the court, namely, healthcare reform.

So Weiner goes down for being an asshole while Thomas skates over the thin ice of overt corruption and coverup?  More HERE.  

Never thought I would do this...

But I'm linking to a Politico Op-Ed by "Morning" Joe Scarborough on the fealty of the GOP to Hard-Right Krazee-Tawk, even in the wake of the Gifford's shooting.  Not a fan of either Politico nor the Starbucks swilling morning mouth, but this is a thoughtful and welcome comment from a conservative who makes a living droning for hours a day on the TeeVee, which is about as rare as finding a pearl in a Big Mac. Worth the read.

Investors of California Unite!

    Meg Whitman has sounded the alarm.  There's class warfare in California (OMG!)  Circle the yachts and ready the chartered jets...

So Wrong In So Many Ways

In the comments to this post, I came across, this bit of hysterical nonsense in which someone decided to photoshop a photo of President Obama in a Soviet uniform to give the impression that Obama = Stalin. Despite the asinine protestations to the contrary, the inference is clear. Can anyone think of another leader of the USSR who regularly wore a uniform? Kosygin did on occasion, but again, the inference is clear - and it's puerile, as are the photoshopped images of Bush as Hitler or Obama as Hitler.

Here's why it's also demeaning: it equates the " suffering" of those under the Bush administration and the Obama administration with those who suffered under the Nazis and under Stalin. It's narcissism of the first order and it says more about those who create it than their intended target. It's time to knock it off.

The wisdom of Balloon Juice

I don't know if such shameless post-pasting is kosher, but here are a pair of great blogbites from John Cole's turf:

The "politics" of nothing...but hysteria and bamboozlement

Glenn Beck pulled off his big "Tea Bags Lite" rally today, which apparently had - at least by his claims - something or other to do with the legacy of Martin Luther King.  And "restoring honor."  Steve Benen tries to figure out what the content of this character's "I have a scheme!" rhetoric amounts to.  Apparently, nothing that can be deciphered as coherent.  Ultimately, it's a platform for inchoate fear and resentments - against Muslims, a black President, brown people from south of the border - and lining the pockets of Barnumesque hucksters like Beck and Palin, not to mention the shadow figures like the Koch brothers who are using these clowns as "populist" cover for their gospel of tax-cuts and de-regulation. 

Post-Script:  One of the best commentaries on this ugly phenomenon - other than Jon Stewart's running take-downs - is still THIS: Kazan and Schulberg's masterpiece, A Face in the Crowd (Andy Griffith's finest hour and a terrific performance by the late, wonderful Patricia Neal.)  Here's the Amazon description, which fits Beck to a "T": 

More timely now, perhaps, than when it was first released in 1957, Elia Kazan's overheated political melodrama explores the dangerous manipulative power of pop culture. It exposes the underside of Capra-corn populism, as exemplified in the optimistic fable of grassroots punditry Meet John Doe. In Kazan's account, scripted by Budd Schulberg, the common-man pontificator (Andy Griffith) is no Gary Cooper-style aw-shucks paragon. Promoted to national fame as a folksy TV idol by radio producer Patricia Neal, Griffith's Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes turns out to be a megalomaniacal rat bastard. The film turns apocalyptic as Rhodes exploits his power to sway the masses, helping to elect a reactionary presidential candidate.

Drilling for the nasty

Here's Pam Geller, the doyen of the anti-Park 51 crowd, in a video from a few years ago reacting to Coulter using the word "faggot" in a speech.  Geller tells the right to be bold.  Be sure to make it to the end (if you can) where she scurrilously suggests Barney Frank runs a gay prostitution ring out of his apartment.

Not too long ago renowned scholar and respected intellect, Dr. Laura, said the word "ni...[a very bad word for black people]" a whole bunch of times on her show, revealing that she's as sensitive to tone as a kazoo.  It's actually not the use of the word, in my view, that's the issue on this show, it's her cartoonish views on race.

Big surprise, our great mama bear and Russian ambassador, Sarah Palin, jumped to her defense with an inscrutable tweet.  Man, is she fond of the gun metaphors which I think are excellent for political debates.

It all kind of puts the lie to the notion of respect being trotted out for the "ground zero mosque" debate.  The right likes to pull out the "respect" card whenever it suits them; don't build a mosque by the WTC site, don't criticize the president during war, and on and on ad nauseum, but they jettison that standard when it doesn't suit them, like when their grotesque views on race are challenged. Listen to Dr. Laura's caller again.  She just wanted some perspective on the frequency with which she hears racially insensitive conversations, but she's told to expect this when she marries outside of her race.  That remark might have been the most amazing one from Dr. Laura who seemed to be channeling 1952.

So what's going on with the right on these matters?  Well, first, it seems to me that they have a decent-sized portion of their base composed of bigots and racists.  Certainly not all of them, but enough that this sort of talk, and defense of it, bubbles up from the slime regularly.  These are not isolated incidents--these bubbles fill the ballast tanks that keep Rush and his pals afloat.  

I think there is more as well.  The PC movement of the 80s, well-intentioned as it was, went too far, what with the various speech codes and the forced resignation of David Howard by the completely illiterate for his use of the word "niggardly".  The right has taken these PC excesses and decided to throw a decades-long temper tantrum. They use the specter of PC correction as an excuse to let loose the darkest dogs of their diseased world view.  They use any criticism, especially on race, to display their fundamental misunderstanding of the first amendment, and to basically stamp their feet and to throw things around.  Their best line is to tell the offended to "get a sense of humor" so they can shift responsibility from themselves.

Theirs is a putridly sick and infantile world view, where blacks are mainly criminals (or if the president, a tribal witch doctor) and Muslims are all terrorists.  Throw in the worship of guns along with this unbridled id, and the subtext isn't hard to tease out.  We have a bunch of fearful and insecure children who think that, as patriots and property owners, they are going to fend off the government and the ni...[very bad word for black people] who want to take their stuff.