Thanks for stopping by

The House is now pretty much vacant, but due to requests, I'm opening the doors back up for whoever wants to look back at the past postings and maybe chuckle at a rant or two. Hopefully, you will read an older, angry post and then look around at this nation and let loose a deep sigh of relief that the Bush years are over.

I never said Goodbye to all my friends, and I've never been good at goodbyes, anyway. So, this will be my fare-thee-well post, 5 months after I quit posting.

This blog (and all of YOUR blogs) saved my life and my sanity many times over the past few years. I haven't been posting because the fire in my gut has cooled somewhat, and I just don't feel like I've had anything worth sharing to impart for a while. I will be content to haunt all of your blogs and listen for awhile and keep my own mouth shut for a little bit. It'll be good for me.

From 2004- 2008, those at the forefront of the Newsblog and Poli-blog movement changed this country. We made a difference. I don't include myself lightly in that "We." I've lost friends and gained friends, traded curses and even fists with a wide array of people over the events that warped and shaped our nation this past half-decade. From arguments with trolls I'll never meet to shouting matches with family members who now grudgingly acquiese because they know they were really and truly wrong. The "trust my gut" era is dead, thank the gods.

When I look back at 2004 in Lubbock when I started blogging, it's almost like looking back at the dark ages. So much has changed, in many ways- but the way I feel is the most important is that I am no longer shouted down when I dare open my mouth in public about ANYTHING. That severe black and white has been merged into a much more manageable grey. And that's a very, very good thing.

So, my work here is done. I've spent all the righteous zeal I possessed. I'll let others, with more nuance, and less in-your-face take over from this point on.

But if ya'll ever need a half-crazy Redneck Liberal to out-smart the fascist white collar ruling class of this country while simultaneously out-white-trashing their bible-thumping racist blue collar pawns- I'll be here... and those of you who know me the best will know it won't take much to recharge my righteous wrath.

Hope for the best and plan for the worst- And don't be bullshittin' the neighbors, now.

Ya'll be good.

I'll try to...

Last Gasp of the Republican Party

Requiem for a Maverick by the incomparable Matt Taibbi

EXCERPT
It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do.

They lost in every way imaginable, on every political front. The symbol of their anti-gay crusade, Colorado congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, was beheaded. The party that had made so much hay running against Mexicans saw noted anti-immigration crusader Bill Sali of Idaho ousted along with several other members of the Immigration Reform Caucus. The GOP's grasp on the so-called "moral values" issue likewise went up in roaring flames, with Rep. Vito Fossella of Staten Island the poster child — his morals were once so perfect that he refused to be seen with his gay sister, and now he's a national joke, bounced after being caught drunk driving and having unprotected, babymaking sex with a married Air Force officer.

The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

I witness the whole pathetic mess summed up a week before the election, on a baseball field in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The campaign has scheduled an outdoor rally, with a joint appearance by McCain and Palin, at this crucial moment in the race. But now there is driving snow and sleet, trees downed on roads all around, and the campaign — with no alternate indoor plan — is forced to cancel the event at the last minute. I watch as locals keep pulling up to the field, looking for the candidate, a lonely, rain-soaked "Country First" banner whipping back and forth above the stage. The whole scene captures the essence of the McCain run perfectly: Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.
...

Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement. The only thing that gave me pause was the question of what kind of country this remarkable figure was now inheriting. Some of the luster of Obama's triumph would come off if the American presidency were no longer the Most Powerful Office in the World but simply the top job in a hopelessly broken nation suffering an irreversible decline.

Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?

When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

Simpler Dreams

The Sucker bait called hope

There's a lot of good stuff in that link. And in a lot of the older posts as well.

...and, following the same thread of "Hope" I bid you goodnight with this prayer to God:

Come, endless darkness- Mother Earth, fold us in your arms, pull us close to your breast-

and choke the poisonous breath from us before we kill everything.

Republican Spam

I receive at least one of those "George Carlin says/Bill Cosby says/David Letterman says/Insert Celebrity name says" emails once a week.

It is always some speak english/worship the flag and the pledge of allegiance/don't take the word "God" off money bullshit. And it's always a lie concerning who wrote the damn thing-

For those of you who get the same standard Republican email spam every day from your lackwit friends and relatives, I've got a canned response that you can customize and respond to all with:
( in order to save you time and effort with the mouthbreathers)

Please forward this to all:

The thing about these email-shortcuts to independent thought is that every single time a "concerned American" sends out these simple-minded screeds- is that they feel they have to say they were written by a celebrity in order to give them some sort of legitimacy. So, they will attribute it to some famous, well-liked celebrity instead of having the guts to put his/her own name on it.

It doesn't take a genius to know David Letterman didn't write this simplistic bit of airy propaganda, with its jingoistic, xenophobic, and not-so subtle racism.

People - please look further than your email box for political insight. I implore you- read a book, preferably a history book- and explore insights that may even seem antithetic to your current world-view.

It REALLY undermines the person's viewpoint in this email, in the simple fact that he had to lie about who really wrote it. If someone really believes what he is saying, why lie about who said it?
My name is Kirk Berryhill and I may not be a celebrity, but I have the guts to stand behind my own words. Please do so yourselves and you will discover that, like the lie concerning who wrote this crap, you will discover more simple lies wrapped in "common sense".

And don't be afraid to piss off Aunt Edna. If unanswered, these morons will never comprehend that there is an alternative other than their circle-of-stupidity-groupthink. Tell them Un-flock themselves.

And hope for the best. The stupid, as bad as it burns, is really contagious.

In Search of the greater good

Kester has an excellent post about leadership and what the Tao Te Ching has to say about it.

He also had a funny post that addresses Blue States vs. Red States, an old joke but a good one. It struck me though, that pitting "us" vs. "them" (as I am guilty of all the time, I know) isn't really smart or good for our future. Nobody's going to pack up and leave the country just because the leader of the "other party" won.

Texas and my fellow Texans have never seemed so ... just damn 'back-ards' as they do this week, with almost every Republican Christian I know praying for the Death of Obama (Seriously).. I would like to point out to Eva that the real Socialist elites are the guys who who 700 Billion bucks to bail themselves out... I don't know How much money these people THINK goes to welfare but believe me, it ain't even close to that number, which is just designed to keep the Rich Elite from falling into the ranks of the Underpriveleged (which, to them, is the under 1 million a year crowd).

The statistics were the most interesting thing to me from the joke post. As someone who loves my whole country, red states and blue states alike, I'm not big on gloating at this point. I just want to take back the country from the willfully stupid and their leaders who can feed their supporters lies all day long and pretend their will never be a backlash.

Note to the Redstate Repubs: Now that the Election is over you can let the scales fall from your eyes(please, o please) and note these TRUTHS, which if simply acknowledged may serve to move this country forward.

1. Obama is a Christian, not a muslim. He may not be the Perfect Christian, but then, neither are you, are you?

2. Obama is definitely not even in the top 20 most liberal Democrats currently serving in the Senate. He is extremely centrist, he has always reached across the aisle (despite the way Republicans have scorned Democrats while they were controlling the country) and he will continue to be bipartisan, (despite the future loud protestations of Democrats).

3. Electing a half-black man who believes that the future of this country lies with the lower and middle class and their well-being, NOT the rich, truly "elitist" CEO entitlement crowd is NOT the Death of our nation. The Death of our nation was narrowly averted. The Death of America and its ideals are being a country that tortures, a country that ignores the rule of law and the constitution, a nation that bombs and invades other countries without provocation, and a nation that only gives flag-waving lip service to its true ideals: Equality, Freedom, and Independence.

If the minds of the red-staters can be wrapped around these three simple ideals, then perhaps we can move forward TOGETHER. Hell, if I can put away my guillotine for the moment, surely ya'll can too.

If we continue to embrace red and blue only, and embrace the black and the white only, we are doomed to witness the death of this nation. Extreme views bring only extreme realities.