[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gCUufJKAKE&feature=channel[/youtube]
Perhaps there are lessons from the 1960’s to be learned for today’s leftists: policy is nothing without passion and creativity, although in the case of the video above a laundry list of fantasy grievances set to canned guitar chords may not be the way to go.
While there are many aggravating things about today’s conservatives, none are as aggravating as their attempts at artistic expression.
If you’re going to make a policy issue about culture, you should make sure you have some.
(Stumbled upon at the site of Ethan Persoff, who also hosts a web version of the “Official Pogrom” for the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial.)
Remarkable. That video is much like what Tass put out in the USSR in the good old days of the Cold War. Trying to merge artistic expression with political propaganda does not work very well. China still does it, so does Cuba. Here, we see the whacked out right wing trying it. Watch this gal pretend to play keyboards. Notice you never see her hands on the keyboards. Also, listen to the soundtrack. Does anybody here any electronic keyboard?
[Deleted — see HA Comment Policy]
Just another Nashville chick.
Drawing a parallel between this woman and Bob Dylan is rather like comparing Mozart and Paula Abdul. She’s a dimwit with electric piano and a video camera.
On the positive side at least she wasn’t using someone else’s stuff w/o permission.
What bio information Google coughs up says this woman was a 20-year master sergeant in the Air Force. It also says she spent some of that time in “elite Air Force musical groups” touring the world and entertaining the troops.
Does this mean that my tax dollars were paying her to fill the heads of our men and women in uniform with the Gospel According To Limbaugh set to music? I don’t find that amusing.
I’m not sure what to make of this. It has to be one side making fun of the other, but I’m not sure which…
http://fartforamerica.blogspot.com/
The Rats Sing
First they jumped ship. Now the Bushrats are squeaking — er, I mean, squealing.
Ex-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says he was pressured to raise the “color alert” before the 2004 election. He refused.
But we always knew the lying Republicans manipulated their cutsy color-coded terror alert system for partisan gain, didn’t we?
A scientific report released today concludes all fish are contaminated with mercury. The good news is you can use fish sticks as a subsitute thermometer.
(Note: I would have corrected the typo in the word “substitute”, but unfortunately clicking on Goldy’s edit function crashed my computer and it took 9 1/2 minutes to reboot, sign back into AOL, wait for HA to load, and reopen this thread.)
The current newsstand issue of Newsweek has a fascinating article about the psychology driving the healthbaggers. Why, the magazine asks, do so many people believe ludicrous lies? Answer: It has to do with the high levels of stress that many people are currently under. When people are stressed out, psychologists say, they listen to fear instead of reason. This is what makes it possible for billionaires to talk financially-battered people into giving the billionaires even more of their money.
“Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they on on into it.”
This was written by Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century historian who is “considered one of the founders of modern source-based history.” (Wikipedia)
This passage appears as the heading to the prologue of Joachim Fest’s epic biography of Adolf Hitler, a book worth your time if you haven’t already read it.
Von Ranke, who died in 1886, could not have foreseen the advent of Hitlerism or the phenomenon America’s gun-brandishing healthbaggers. He was simply commenting on a universality of human nature.
Fest, an anti-Nazi German academic who lived through the Nazi era and wrote about it from his German perspective after Hitler was safely dead, specifically had the slavish devotion of Hitler’s followers in mind when he quoted von Ranken’s observation.
From my rabbit’s perspective, human nature doesn’t change over time or space. It’s been my experience you humans are all basically alike. Some of you overcome your natural tendencies with a combination of discipline and knowledge; but many of you — especially the Republican cohort — are gullible fools who are readily susceptible to the power of suggestion and manipulation of emotion. Like lemmings running over a cliff, you rush headlong to your destruction, with Rush egging you on. Why you listen to that guy, and others like him, is a fucking mystery.
But no matter. After you stupid humans have bankrupted, then killed, yourselves with your strange affection for private for-profit health insurance, rabbits will fill your niche and run this place, and I’ll be their king!! So have at it, fucktards. Keep your private for-profit health insurance! HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR !!!
4 A
More like comparing Mozart to Sarah Palin. Paula Abdul has a modicum of talent and is only partially crazy.
@12
I dunno, I always see rabbits running away from things.
I do however, see the wingnitwits running headlong into the same rhetoric time and time again. Every generation of the primitive reactionaries think that they have all the answers already spelled out in that little black book of theirs. Any new event or situation throws them into a tizzy untill they can find an apparently relevant passage in the book of revelations. This is a very old, well-established method of kingmakers and dictators from any cultural foundation throughout history.
One major personality aspect I see in educated and pragmatic liberal folks is that unwillingness to just immiediatly take people at their word without a proven track record for truthfullness and reality based trustworthyness. We’ve been burned enough times in life to realize that not everyone has good intentions or is an honest person.
That politicians have the greatest motive to lie, have the greatest access to wealth manipulations and the ability to create new avenues of corruption is obvious to everyone. The perceptions of the purposes of those politicians are as varied as there are species of fish in the sea.
The wingnitwit I have working for me, is utterly convinced that this President is going to round up all the christians and put them in gas chambers. That the manufacturers of railroad boxcars have been recently ordered to build special airtight cars with shackles built into them. That the lands around the country that have been fenced off to keep the yahoos out, are hiding massive FEMA camps that all the christians are going to be herded into for orderly disposal. Everything, and I mean everything, is a conspiracy to destroy the economy of the United States and enslave the American people for some unknown, sinister purpose. According to these psychopaths, Barack Obama is literally the antichrist. It’s all right there in scripture.
His most oft-used perjoratave is “political correctness” which he will often insert as a total non-sequetor in various conversations. I doubt he even really knows what it means. He’s an absolutist, either it IS or it ISN’T, there is no middle ground and certainly no possible way he can be wrong about anything. he cannot be told “No” for anything. This sort of lame propaganda is right up his alley. This peradigm is almost universal in the wingnitwit mentality. They ceased any self-education and maturation when they turned three years old.
The Modern Air Force in the US has become a bastion of ultra-right wing neochristian philosophy. The generals in charge of the Academy are openly facist, athiests and non protestant christians are regularly drummed out or singled out for disciplines that devoted calvinists are mostly exempt from.
The Germans too used their Air Force to maintain the extermination facilities in Poland and Germany. The Luftwaffe was also the institution that created and manufactured most of the propaganda used to justify the progroms and enforcement of the philosophy. They trained people in specific phraseology and how to carry themselves in a way that transmitted a sense of truthiness and certainty in the information they were dissemenating to the subjected populations. This woman in the vid is obviously a product of similiar training, and likely selected for apparent attractiveness and personal demeanor. It is the same as before. Attempting to combine popular music with outright propaganda, lyrics that are based in already massively debunked fabrications of the right wing panic culture that we are now seeing in the mass media.
That can go either way, either by finally being shown for the insane people they are and losing credibility, or convincing enough people of the veracity of their position to regain political power and start protecting themselves from the threats they perceive.
It just seems to me that the so-called “right wing” in this country is entirely built out of the idea that there is no possible way that the individuals adhering to that mindset can be wrong about anything, that their perceptions of how the world works and how people think are absolute in nature. There is no room for gray areas, absurdity or nuance. That there is no room for compromise in any way, shape or form.
They cannot be told NO.
If you aint got nothing, you gotta make it up.
@9 Ferget it. No way is some nurse going to stick a steelhead up my ass.
@16:
Um, any anadromous fish will do….they all swim upstream to lay eggs :)
@14 It might be surmised that some of the motivation of our current crop of right-wing zealots is the scratching awareness in the back of their minds that the disruption of the status quo they currently enjoy is inevitable. This could be seen as especially true of members of our current Air Force, which is still oriented to a mission of preparedness for all-out, strategic nuclear war that isn’t likely to ever happen. It’s a little like the “battleship admirals” going into World War II reacting to the ascent of carrier-based aircraft as the principal instrument of war at sea. That the Navy has been the principal source of air support in our adventures in the Middle East probably doesn’t sit well with those who still idolize Curtis LeMay.
The Mat-Su Barbie is just tops with the birthers:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.....hp?ref=fpb
@14: Nice post. Here are some links to the Air Force and the “proselytizing” attitude. I have nothing against people having strong personal beliefs in god. In fact, I admire many people who do. It is the active advocacy to convert people (I admire people who live their faith in their everyday life (much more difficult), not those who adverstise it) and the use of government resources for private religious purposes that bothers me:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05.....ademy.html
@18
Curtis Lemay was a similiar fanatic who tried every trick in the book to wrest control of the military, and specifically the nuclear weapons stockpiles away from the Federal Government. At one point he threatened to use the US air force against Washington DC to get his way. He had personal motivations, mostly religious in nature and was a deeply psychotic person.
His rationalizations were almost exclusively rooted in scripture and his utter contempt for civilian authority and international diplomacy. To him, the Constitution was aneathema to his personal belief system. He openly said as much many times.
The wingnitwits are appalled at the fact that they can’t always control the conversation. That there are other methods other than instilling fear to motivate people. They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be educated, and steadfastly refuse to even look at the obvious. They are the Know-Nothings. They are the same people that ran Tammany Hall. They are the decendants of the same people that boom-and-busted the US economy into the Great Depression, and they KNOW it.
This is the new conservative mindset:
Start with predisposition toward selfishness and greed. Allow no conflicting ideas, allow no deep exploration of a question, allow no serious investigation of emergent situations and permit corruption where it benefits their own greater good.
Corruption is permissible where it benefits those with the largest share of wealth. They cannot understand why non-wealthy people would even want the right to have anything to say about their own lives. It just doesn’t compute at all. They deny rights to ordinary citizens, claim responsibility for positive outcomes and be the first to blame opposition for their disasters. Personal responsibility is really for the other guy. That doesn’t apply to them. Their actions are sanctioned and blessed by god.
Reagan took credit for the Berlin wall coming down and the re-unification of Germany, even though it was well known by analysts and scholars that the governments and economies of East Germany and the Soviet Union were in collapse for years before the events that led to the wall being torn down.
The fact that there are outright lies being told and repeated in conservative circles, the “death panels” and the birth certificate issue and openly passing discrimination laws against gay citizens and minority populations shows what they stand for.
Fascism. Rule by divine right and assumption of greater personal ability instead of permission from the masses. Hoarding wealth and refusing to allow others to even participate in the same systems that made them wealthy.
They are primitives, reactionaries and pathalogical liars. They are hateful, selfish and greedy. They are devotees of warfare and other forms of violence because they LIKE it. It allows them to continue to be the tough kid in the schoolyard who beats you up and takes your lunch money.
Warfare is to them, the only way to motivate people and make money. It allows them to use the threat of violence, either from external threat or by themselves to gain “market share” in the political arenas of the country. Violence is the ONLY primary motivator they understand. They cannot fathom a world without it. They openly state that the first indicator of the antichrist will be his ability to prevent violence and stop warfare. They cannot live with their personal psychology without needing an enemy to stand against.
They aren’t FOR anything. They react, with the lizard part of their brain to every stimuli as a threat. They know no calm. No peace. No compromise. They fear. And that fear is all they have. They then believe that everyone should be fearful and do everything they can to spread that fear as far and wide as they can, even to the point of telling the biggest whoppers they can muster. They cannot understand why people can, and should, be living without that personal terror.
Because they have nothing, and I mean nothing else to go on. They are terrified, cowardly, weak little people.
@21 That about covers it. The part that’s difficult to explain in rational terms is why so many of the right’s supporters are anything but rich and haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming so. It’s a pretty safe bet that the folks showing up at “town halls” to bray like jackals, brandish their weapons and throw figurative poo at everyone else aren’t members of the privileged class. The rich, shall we say, have “other things to do”.
That they embrace the very policies by which they themselves are victimized, and go berserk when any of their beliefs are challenged, reminds me of nothing so much as dealing with my poor mother’s descent into paranoia and delusion as Alzheimer’s ate away at her brain. My siblings and I would get phone calls at 3:00 in the morning from her, in hysteria over the “strange man” who was in the house (meaning Dad) and how she wanted us to come over and help her “go home”. (It got even more interesting when she called the police.)
It occurred to me that as her memories disappeared, along with her ability to process information about her surroundings, her mind simply filled the void by making stuff up. In the same way, the extreme right is conjuring up nonsensical fantasies, because they’ve completely run out of anything practical or even sensible to offer.
@21 I’d never heard before about LeMay being hard-over religious. I certainly did hear, from both his admirers and his detractors (and one friend who knew him personally) that like many strong leaders he had a very high opinion of himself. It always impressed me that at one time (in WWII) he was the right guy in the right place at the right time, simply because he was such a pragmatic, hard-nosed sumbitch who was willing to do whatever was necessary to get the job done.
He and the corresponding characters who no doubt shaped the Soviet military had a lot to do with the 40-year nuclear impasse that followed. They and their proteges eventually became a solution in search of a problem.