Cocktailhag, the blog

Increasingly it seems that Republican candidates are, in the post Reagan era, chosen solely as spokesmodels; just like choosing an anchorwoman at Fox News…  not much upstairs, but what a staircase.  The trend has two roots: the first is that Republicans fundamentally believe that intellect, energy, and accomplishment are only found, or needed, in the private sector, and the second is that they have absolutely nothing, policy-wise, that will sell without a whole lot of deceptive packaging delivered by a lightweight who can’t decipher, much less answer, any difficult questions.  Bush, Palin, the Quayles, Michele Bachmann: the list is long of utter halfwits expensively trotted out to babble sweet nothings to America’s dumbest voters, so the right people can get their paws on the US treasury again.  Although one can question the morality of such undemocratic hocus-pocus, one can hardly argue with success.  But look at the bright side:  suffering Americans occasionally get a little comic relief listening to these cretins on the rare occasions they deign to speak to the media.  It’s never pretty.

Last night Cocktailhag-American Jan Brewer, governor (!) of Arizona, was faced with what turned out to be, for her, an insurmountable task: giving  one-minute opening statement in the debate between her and her Democratic opponent for reelection, and she actually managed to make Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes Scholar.  It was stupefying, really.  She had a a few bland, content-free platitudes prepared and a little anti-Obama red meat, but she clearly had no idea what they might be, even as someone must have been applying her pancake.  Remember, Palin didn’t launch, jaw-droppingly, into moose-peranto until she was foiled by “gotcha” questions from that bulldog Katie Couric; Brewer was unable to read on television, without making a dunderheaded ass of herself, a PREPARED ONE-MINUTE STATEMENT.  On a Fox affiliate, to boot.

Is there any sort of floor, at long last, for Republican stupidity?  The whole point of the exercise is to make bad ideas look good on TV, and Brewer just scored a big, fat, fail, which is obviously destined to become a youtube blockbuster.  (The video is inescapable on the internet…  go to digby, tbogg, salon, tpm, or pretty much anywhere to watch it;  just pee first and set down all beverages before clicking play…)  Sure, Palin’s stupidity has been parleyed  into her well-crafted victimhood schtick, and stupid people everywhere are gaga over her for reasons they are unable to articulate, but nonetheless firmly hold; a undoubtedly boffo combination that has won many Republican victories in the recent past, but honestly…  Lengthy seconds of giggly silence, as the huge false eyelashes are cast down at something on her desk (what?  My Pet Goat?  Atlas Shrugged?) doesn’t seem like the sort of performance that is going to win over thinking Arizonans, in the unlikely event that there remains such a thing.

Clearly, Brewer has decided, along with most other far right Republicans running this season, that all media, except Fox and hate radio, is the enemy, and see no reason to engage with it at all.  But since they do have to sometimes appear in public before they are elected and can get on with the looting (in Brewer’s case it’s private prisons, who are eagerly making room for all the SB 1070 arrests already…), impertinent backtalk from the Fourth Estate can’t entirely be avoided, so would you people please, for the love of God, at least practice your vapid talking points?  The answer is obviously no.

Here in Oregon we have the male equivalent of a PalinBrewer ConservaBarbie running for governor, whose total qualifications for office consist of being 7 feet tall, a former Trailblazer, and the worst free-thrower in the NBA.  His name is Chris Dudley, and guess what?  No debates, and no appearances except with right-leaning media, and he has so much money, he just might beat former governor John Kitzhaber that way, with content-free attack ads.  Ah, democracy in the Citizens (!) United  era.  Let the dumbest candidate win.

Today a conservative caller who naturally identified himself as a Democrat called Thom Hartmann’s show to harshly criticize Obama’s Mission Accomplished, the Sequel, because it failed to praise effusively enough the genius of George Bush and the “success of the surge.”   This in itself wasn’t surprising, given that the round-the-clock devotion to the Legacy Project on the right makes such absurd assertions mandatory, these types of programmed troll-callers always proliferate in election seasons to read off the ticker tape, and none other than John Boehner had just said the same addlepated things the evening before.  But then the caller went on to say that given David Petraeus’ earth-shattering, seven year boondoggle and waste of blood and money in Iraq that did nothing but create a regional catastrophe and a triumph for Iran, was the sort of glorious victory  that would make Petraeus one of history’s greatest generals, especially after he (or his grandchildren) finish up in Afghanistan.  That’s what he said.  Really.  As in move over, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, and hell, Alexander the Great; David Petraeus bestrides the globe like a Colossus, for evermore.  And Bush will be on Mount Rushmore pretty soon, just you wait.  Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah, liberal scum.

The point was, of course, to kick Moveon.org to the curb in passing while spraying perfume on the many piles of shit left behind by the Decider, neatly condensed into a twenty-second sound bite; but usually the material isn’t quite as hilariously outlandish as this; I sense a little fear under the outward overconfidence.  Whenever Republicans have several elephants, fittingly enough, in the living room that put their corruption and incompetence on vivid display, they do one of two things.  First, they explain that that animal in question isn’t an elephant at all, but merely a mouse with a thyroid condition, and when that doesn’t work, they explain that having elephants in the living room is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should have more of them.  Wars, tax cuts, deficits, you name it, this always works, until it doesn’t, and Republicans must be aware that a lot of people have caught on to this.  So, they have two choices:  Pretend, like the media and Washington establishment, that the wars, though in the end unfortunate and utterly unnecessary,  seemed like good ideas at the time; or just go whole hog and glorify them as great and historic triumphs, medals rather than stains on the record of their heroes.  I have to hand it to them; choosing option two takes balls, if not brains.

Last time I checked, huge majorities of Americans, and even a plurality of Republicans, are resigned to the fact that Bush, the War(s), Petraeus, the Neocons and on and on were horrible mistakes that damaged the country, and have been saying that to pollsters since 2005 or so, and the media-hyped Republican sweep of 2010 will require the non-insane 75% of Americans to weigh in, too.  Endlessly repeating, and getting people to sort of believe that The Surge Worked, Republicans are ignoring the fact that most people are sick to death of war, and they associate it, rightly, with them.  But they can’t help it; Bush’s belligerence and chest-thumping defiance of the dreaded “International Law” aroused a deep vein of old-fashioned xenophobia and tribalism that has clearly proven too intoxicating to the right to let go of it now, even when it risks alienating more and more voters, particularly in the longer term.  To the authoritarian mind, which is the only kind left on the right these days, the truth must never be accepted when a lie would sound better, and unbelievers simply have to be eliminated.  Again, this strategy works wonders with a certain very committed sliver of the population, on policy matters both domestic and international, but the catastrophic failures it inevitably produces turns off the majority time and again.

After last night, when I got to hear the purported anti-Bush President even mildly praise our country’s worst President in a dishearteningly Neocon-ish speech, I dreaded the Democrat’s prospects in November, but then I heard today what may well be the Republicans’ new talking point for the fall (one doesn’t introduce new products in August, you know…) and my heart leapt. If the Republicans intend to roll out Bush and Iraq as the party’s signature success stories, Bring It On.   And if they think Iraq looks like victory, I’d hate to see what they think defeat looks like.   Let’s hope voters refresh their memories in November.

Republicans?  It’s me, God, and I have a little message for you:  Cut it out or you’re going to get a lightning bolt, (and I don’t mean that in a good way, Larry Craig, Ken Mehlman, et al…)

Being omniscient and all, I did manage to catch some of your dreadful display of Pharisee-like false piety over the weekend, although your ratings were pretty nonexistent up here, since Fox News only plays downstairs.  But seriously, when will you, as a group, ever stop claiming me as your ally?  It’s getting a little embarrassing, and bad for the God brand, since everything you say and do is pretty much the opposite of what the Bible tells you with what is, after all, my creation, not yours.  Worse, rather than keeping your communications with me private as instructed, you are forever blustering in the streets, basically stealing my Good Name and attaching it to your ignorant, self-serving nonsense for your own ends, none of which I support, nor did my son, as you ought to know, since you incessantly claim to be our bestest friends.

It may come as a surprise to you, but, guess what?  I don’t favor any group of humanity over the other; I created them all for a reason, and you don’t get to choose which ones I like.  I didn’t put gays on earth just to fix your hair and help you decorate, nor did I put Muslims on earth just to drive cabs; my intention was for all my children to live happy lives, too.  (I did hope that Africans might help white people learn to dance better, but the results there have been admittedly mixed.  Give it another millennium or two….)   Most importantly, I was pretty specific about the fact that rich people, for a lot of good reasons, aren’t generally allowed up here, and your constant, heretical exaltation of the rich frankly makes me want to throw up.  Did you think that thing about “the least of my brothers” was a typo or something?  What about the camel and the needle’s eye?  Sheesh.

It seems that once you invoke my Will to support your demented political theories, which I’ve shown you several times don’t work, you plan to go on as usual pillaging my Creation, stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and busily slaughtering my children hither and yon; do you have any idea how fucked up that is?  (Yeah, I can swear all I want…  Who’s going to punish me?)  As I mentioned earlier and cannot emphasize enough, the earth, and all the creatures on it, are MINE, not yours.  Time and again, you have used me to do your dirty work, and now you’re trotting out some of the most regrettable of my creations, whose only desire seems to be shameless self-aggrandizement, and making me look like an ass as usual.

It’s possible that by teaming up with the worst of my followers, you will again gain power by, well, bearing false witness and taking my name in vain among other things, and then be empowered to take a big dump on the rest of my Commandments.  This outcome means about what you’d expect, if you have ever bothered to read my words.  We’ll be adding a few more rooms downstairs, in the hottest section.

Since I know that none of you actually believe a word you say, I can’t blame your cravenness on stupidity, of which I’m generally quite forgiving.  This is much worse; I’m having the Terrible Swift Sword sharpened as we speak.

I just finished watching Sarah Palin’s speech at the Fox-sponsored teabagger “rally,” hosted by Glenn Beck on this day to mock and dishonor Martin Luther King, or maybe just because.  They’ve lied quite a bit about that subject, so I’m not going to presume to know the real motive.  The speech was quite weird, and even more disturbing than I expected.  Sadly, ol’ Sarah decidedly wasn’t speaking off the cuff, (or palm, as far as I could tell…) so we won’t need to add any new words to the dictionary this time, but the content of her words, mindless glorification of three lost, pointless wars, was quite ominous.  It seems that the one thing all ‘baggers can agree on, when they’re trying to be “non-political,” is that America is only as great as its Military Industrial Complex, which is pretty great, admittedly.  The shouts of “USA!  USA!” after the Vietnam vet was introduced were reminiscent of nothing if not History Channel Hitler documentaries.  Sarah’s message was the same as the “Good Germans” in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret:” Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and the cleansing victory will be found on the battlefield.  (In Palinese, “battle-filled….)

You see, it would be too “political” to yammer as usual about “wealth redistribution,” ACORN, The New Black Panthers, and whatnot, although this is the real message of the teabagger’s wealthy sponsors, so they settled on the awesomeness of war, no matter which, much less why.    Palin is the perfect messenger for this twisted and destructive bloodlust; she bragged about sending one of her many children into the military meatgrinder, and the crowd went wild.  Still, the studied blandness of her obviously ghost-written words that followed, with banal and insultingly shallow allusions to Washington, Lincoln, and of course Martin Luther King, belied their darker meaning: Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their many imitators and followers have decided that from here on out, America will forever be at war, and they’re, for once, probably right.

Land of the free and home of the brave, my ass….  this bunch of armchair “warriors” want nothing more than to watch their country go bankrupt cheering “USA!” as trillions of taxpayer dollars are permanently diverted from urgent domestic needs to pointless and expensive wars hither and yon.  Small Government and less spending?  You can forget that.  The ‘baggers are either too dumb or too psychotic to do the math on this subject, and  Queen Sarah obligingly gave them a little of both, as you’d expect.

Of course, Martin Luther King deplored war, fought for what Glenn Beck sneeringly derides as “social justice,” and probably rolled over in his grave when he heard Beck describe the first African American President of the United States a a racist , but never mind all that.  For America’s Honor to be Restored, all we have to do is keep fighting in, dying in, and paying for wars, while Sarah Palin “pals around” with sterling civil rights activists like, say, Dr. Laura.  What would Dr. King have thought of Palin telling that racist harridan to “reload?”

Despite the guarded words and the wounded vets trotted out as props, the noticeable drops in the crowd’s enthusiasm when she said something insufficiently bellicose was telling:  the teabaggers are itching for war, at home and abroad, and they have found it in Sarah, looking fetching as ever dressed as War President Barbie.

The teabaggers have a dream, alright, and it isn’t a pleasant one.

Further evidence emerged today that the storied Wall Street Journal has well and fully become Fox News, only boring, a process that took even less time than I’d initially thought.  James Taranto typed the following today:

“It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia,” Daisy Khan, wife of Ground Zero mosque planner Feisal Abdul Rauf, told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour Sunday. “It’s hate of Muslims.” As we noted yesterday, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking to a Muslim gathering at Gracie Mansion, called critics of the mosque plan “un-American” and implied that they seek “to implicate all of Islam” for the 9/11 attacks.

So far, so good; quoting accurate assessments from Park51 supporters seems almost un-Murdochlike, but later you’ll find out why he led with this.

Yesterday, an ugly crime occurred in New York that seemed to confirm this narrative. Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student, allegedly stabbed taxi driver Ahmed Sharif, 43, in the throat. The Wall Street Journal has the details:

According to an account provided by Mr. Sharif through the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Mr. Enright started out asking Mr. Sharif friendly questions like how long he has been in the country, if he was Muslim and if he was observing fast during Ramadan. Mr. Enright became silent for a few minutes and “then suddenly started cursing and screaming” before the stabbing, the statement says.

Police said that Mr. Enright stabbed the driver through an opening on the side of the taxi’s protective partition. Mr. Sharif was able to scramble out of the cab, lock its doors and then call 911. An officer on patrol nearby arrived to find Mr. Enright sprawled out on the street, having fallen after climbing out one of the cab’s back windows.

Sharif is out of the hospital, but it was a close call: “Prosecutor James Zaleta said that an emergency medical technician who treated Mr. Sharif said had the wound ‘been a fraction of an inch longer or deeper, he would have been dead at the scene.’ ” Enright is charged with attempted murder, with the stipulation that the attack was a hate crime.

Seems pretty straightforward, but then the Foxified Taranto, in one of the usual “wars” the Murdoch media always tiresomely fight with their journalistic superiors, has to go all Bill O’Reilly on the New York Times:

The New York Times’s account of the crime presents it as fitting the narrative of anti-Muslim hatred. It opens with a crisply dramatic account of the incident, followed by some basic facts (Enright’s attempt to flee, his arrest, Sharif’s medical disposition, the charges, a quote from Enright’s lawyer informing us that the suspect is “terrified,” the poor baby).

It’s clear by now that there’s a conspiracy brewing;  to any self-respecting right-wing hack, “poor baby” and “liberal” are synonymous.

That takes us through 15 paragraphs. Paragraphs 16 through 18 put the crime in a broader context:

The violence that erupted during the cab ride came amid a heated and persisting national debate over whether to situate a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. Upon learning of the attack on the cabdriver, some Muslim groups called for political and religious leaders to quiet tensions.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.”

In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we may pray to.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Sharif and told him “ethnic or religious bias has no place in our city.” He invited him to come to see him at City Hall on Thursday.

Get out Glenn Beck’s chalkboard….

By contrast, here’s the third paragraph of the Journal story: “The attack comes amid tensions over a planned mosque near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan, but police didn’t link it to the simmering debate.”

Yeah, just like you don’t link crabs to hookers, necessarily.

Back to the Times: Paragraphs 19 and 20 report that cops believe Enright was drunk, though that wasn’t Sharif’s impression. Paragraph 21 gives us some background about Sharif, including that he opposed the Ground Zero mosque on the basis “that there was no need to put it there.”

Paragraphs 22 through 38–the last 17 paragraphs of the story–tell us of the suspect’s background: “What is known about Mr. Enright presents a complicated picture.” He lives in Brewster, a suburb north of New York City. He goes to the School of Visual Arts. He has some previous arrests for minor crimes. He spent time embedded with Marines in Afghanistan for a film-school project called “Home of the Brave.”

Yes, James, the Times did do a great deal more reporting than the depleted fishwrap you work for, but does that constitute a media conspiracy?

Then–in paragraphs 28 and 29–comes this:

Ooh, you just know this is going to be something good!

Mr. Enright is also a volunteer with Intersections International, an initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York that promotes justice and faith across religions and cultures. The organization, which covered part of Mr. Enright’s travel expenses to Afghanistan, has been a staunch supporter of the Islamic center near ground zero. Mr. Enright volunteered with the group’s veteran-civilian dialogue project.

Joseph Ward III, the director of communications for Intersections, said that if Mr. Enright had been involved in a hate crime, it ran “counter to everything Intersections stands for” and was shocking.

By now, if you’re a righty, of course you believe that the attacker was really a liberal Muslim-lover out to shame Real Americans, and he risked murder and hate crime charges because his Muslim-loving employers indoctrinated and probably paid him to, while the America-hating New York Times is naturally in cahoots on the whole plot.  Really.  Taranto thinks that, and says so:

It’s shocking, all right. It’s also news! The Times hasn’t exactly buried the lead here: The attack is a significant story in itself, and it’s an entirely defensible editorial decision to begin by simply telling what (allegedly) happened.

By definition, all crimes reported prior to trial are “alleged.”   I guess they don’t know that anymore at WSJ.  And they have to rely on the New York Time to actually report said news.  Sad, really.

But revealing the suspect’s association with the pro-mosque left so low in the story shows atrocious news judgment. Rehearsing the America-hates-Muslims narrative first strongly suggests that the Times’s reporting is driven more by an ideological agenda than by the facts of the case.

At least they reported it, not like your atrocious rag, so it seems unlikely that they have anything to hide, unless you’re a crazy person who thinks everyone else can’t finish a long news story either.  Which, evidently, you are:

That ideological agenda is shared by Intersections International, as evidenced by the organization’s Aug. 2 statement supporting the Ground Zero mosque:

The controversy surrounding this project stems from the fact that the proposed building location lies in close proximity to the former World Trade Center, the site of the horrific terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001. Intersections grieves along with those who suffered losses in that tragedy. Intersections acknowledges that any association between that event and this project is a fabrication. Further, Intersections applauds the work of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, principals in The Cordoba House, for their long-term and steadfast commitment to interfaith relations. While acknowledging the real pain that 9/11 continues to evoke, Intersections deplores those who would use this project to promote fear and vitriol for personal gain or partisan politics.

One of the neat things about being a righty is that you get to pretend not to know really obvious things when it’s convenient to do so, and Taranto is no exception.  Without so much as uttering a Miss Piggy-like “Moi?” he behaves as though the venomous lies spewing forth every five minutes about the project’s imagined links to terrorism, from his own employers, simply don’t exist.  Behold:

The claim that “any association” between the 9/11 attacks and the mosque “is a fabrication” is preposterous. As the Associated Press has reported, “the center’s association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence.” And when Intersections International “deplores those who would use this project to promote fear and vitriol for personal gain or partisan politics,” it adds its voice to those who falsely claim that anti-Muslim bigotry is pervasive and is the prime or only reason for Americans’ opposition to the mosque’s siting.

Of course the site was no accident; it was meant to promote interfaith healing and a memorial to those lost, hundreds of whom were Muslim New Yorkers, you racist pile of shit.  Further, mosques coast to coast are now being vandalized and opposed by the same people you’re luring from their Barcoloungers to kill ragheads hither and yon.  But go ahead and share with us your ridiculous fantasy world:

Yesterday’s crime almost certainly was the act of a lone disturbed individual. (They never tire of saying that, but lots of Americans are pretty tired of hearing it…)  But the nature of that disturbance cries out for scrutiny. A highly plausible theory of the case is that the attacker sought to advance the narrative that America is filled with anti-Muslim bigots whose hatred is behind the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque. Had Enright succeeded in fleeing the scene, there is little doubt that the propagators of that narrative would have seized upon the crime even more aggressively than they have in making their case.

Ahmed Sharif’s attacker seems to have chosen him as a victim because of his religion–a factor that, if proved, makes the attack a hate crime under New York law. If our theory is correct, the motive for this alleged anti-Muslim hate crime was bigotry against Americans.

I’m glad this guy lives in New York, where it’s unlikely he drives a motor vehicle.

No one is responsible for the crime except for the criminal. Even so, shame on Mayor Bloomberg, Daisy Khan, the New York Times and everyone else who has promoted the destructive lie that it is hateful to take offense at the Ground Zero mosque and that America is a nation of haters.

Well, James, if you left we’d be less of one….  So do us all a favor and move to Dubai like the rest of them.  But it even gets better, when he puts on his ill-fitting Coulter wig and starts hurling the whole right-wing kitchen sink into the mix….  I wonder what time it was when he typed this:

Maybe We Should Call It a ‘Partial-Earth Construction’

We noticed an interesting locution in an early story on the Times website about the attack on Ahmed Sharif. It referred to the Ground Zero mosque as “Park51, the proposed Islamic center that some critics call the ‘ground zero mosque.’ “

You see what they’re trying to do here, and it’s not necessarily indicative of bias. “Ground Zero mosque” is the most recognizable appellation for the as-yet-nonexistent whatever-it’s-supposed-to-be, but it’s not the formal name, and the pro-mosque side of the debate would prefer to call it something less in-your-face. So the Times resorts to apophasis, calling it the Ground Zero mosque by telling readers it’s not calling it that.

It reminds us of partial-birth abortion, or what the Times calls “the medical procedure critics call partial-birth abortion.” Supporters of the Ground Zero mosque may be less than thrilled with that association.

Ah, refusing, as the AP and many other real journalistic outlets have done, to use manipulative and concocted right-wing names for everything is somehow nefarious….  The Sulzbergers must be quaking in their boots.

Back in 2000, before Republicans had ruined the economy, bankrupted the government, lost two wars, let a huge terror attack occur and an American city drown, they could afford to be, well, civilized.  All that fake talk of “Armies of Compassion” and whatnot has long since dropped by the wayside nowadays, and although Hitlerian scapegoating of minorities does offer some short-term political benefits, it isn’t the smartest strategy long term, unless they really do plan to end democracy as we know it in favor of establishing a racist dictatorship. On a day when we find that a Muslim cab driver in NY was slashed in a racially-motivated hate crime and a mosque in the dusty hellhole of Madera, CA was vandalized by a white supremacist group, it’s pretty silly to pretend that what’s happening on the right over Cordoba House has much to do with “insensitivity” on the part of the center’s backers, and everything to do with craven race baiting on the right.

Ever since they lost their legitimacy eight ways to Sunday, thanks to their bumbling “Leader,” George Bush, the right wing has turned to, or more accurately, on, all sorts of people, and knock me over with a feather, all the demonized groups happen to be the same ones Hitler went after: gays, immigrants, foreigners, etc.  The right still cries crocodile tears for that one time somebody compared Bush to the Nazis, despite the fact that his policies of aggressive wars, militant nationalism, hostility to free speech, extrajudicial imprisonment, appeals to lost honor, favoring corporations, and on and on, were the exact same policies of the Fuhrer.  Perhaps worried about the obviousness of such plain facts, obese basement-dweller and wingnut welfare queen Jonah Goldberg hastily penned something called “Liberal Fascism,” which sought to “prove” that conservatives weren’t fascists, even though they, well, acted like them.

I confess I had a hard time at first seeing this coming; when my Fox and Limbaugh-addled father started spouting off about “Immigrants,” which in his less measured terms meant Mexicans, it seemed so kooky, deranged, and embarrassing that I though it was the last gasps of a dying political movement, relegated to race-baiting because it was flat out of material.  After all, this was in the mid-2000′s, where everyone (white) who was anyone had Mexican servants easing their lives by tending their children, mowing their lawns, cleaning their houses, and hanging their drywall.  A form of slavery had been quietly reintroduced in America, to the great advantage of many, and now these nincompoops were going to screw things up by demonizing the slaves?  Talk about killing the golden goose.

Fast forward to now, when America has been treated to yet another Republican collapse of the economy, which always has the salutary effect (for them) of making Americans desperate enough to give failed Republicans a second look.  People afraid for their jobs and livelihoods don’t care about the environment, their fellow citizens, or, it  seems, not looking like racist knuckle-draggers; when the facts, the law, and common sense and decency are all against you, why not pull out the white sheets and Swastikas?  It worked for Hitler, after all. Thus, we’ve been treated to a veritable assembly line of concocted enemies:  blacks have joined Mexicans, liberals, and gays on the McCarthyite “list” of Bad Americans, and even the grave national security risks associated with demonizing and attacking an entire religion, Muslim Americans have been added to the list.  When the next terror attack inevitably occurs because of this cynical and destructive pogrom, count on Republicans to blame not themselves, but our Muslim-coddling President.  Win, win, I guess.

As America slowly goes bankrupt, the wars go on and on, and we toss our Bill of Rights on the top of burning Korans, the right wing is going to have to get more and more creative to try to blame others for these unfolding disasters, but they’re clearly up to the challenge.  After all, the cab driver slasher was only 21 years old, not an eightysomething relic like my dad, but he nonetheless blossomed into a bloodthirsty, Crusades-era racist under the careful tutelage of charlatans like Glenn Beck et al.  Racism, bigotry, and hate-filled violence aren’t born into humans; as the South Pacific song goes, “You Have To Be Carefully Taught.”  Enter Glenn Beck with his chalkboard, and Rupert Murdoch with his billions.

Bummer for 43-year old Ahmed Sharif, though, who is recovering from his stab wounds, while the pudgy, drunken cretin who attacked him, Michael Enright, is to be tried for hate crimes.  One of the signs posted at the vandalized Madera mosque was unintentionally ironic; it said, “Wake Up America, The Enemy is Here,” and it was even correctly spelled.   The enemy is here, all right, and it’s got another election to steal.   Expect the worst.  You’ll never be disappointed.

Today Joe Scarborough emerged, along with Ron Paul, as another lonely Republican opponent of the anti “Ground Zero Mosque” movement, using about the most risible argument I’ve heard so far:

(h/t Raw Story)

Republicans are going to be embarrassed at the way they’ve opposed a mosque — known as Cordoba House or Park51 — that’s planned near Ground Zero, according to one conservative host.

That would be the rational assumption, of course, but the very idea that after all this time, Joe “shut up about that dead girl” Scarborough would still believe that Republicans are even capable of embarrassment, shows that the poor guy is as dumb as he looks.  Has he never heard of David Vitter?  John Boehner?  Dick Cheney?  Tom DeLay?  Michele Bachmann?  Surely he’s at least heard of Sarah Palin.  The main thing all righties have in common, which Scarborough ostensibly fails to see, is that they are never, ever wrong when looking in the mirror, an endeavor to which they clearly devote considerable time, despite their jaw-dropping and well-documented lies, corruption, tawdriness, and/or flat-out stupidity.  To them, and hopefully their Fox-addled followers, they’re still the fairest of them all, and (Lina Lamont voice) “don’t anybody forget it.”  Despite this glaring oversight, you’ve still got to give Morning Joe a little credit:

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough told Republicans Monday that they should “speak out against Newt Gingrich and the voices of hate.” While he was at it, Scarborough threatened to leave the GOP for a party “that actually believes in small government.”

Well, Joe never got his Husky Boy briefs in a twist when Bush expanded, drastically, the size and reach of Big Brother Government when it might have mattered, but you have to give him, say,  a free Supersize upgrade for finally waking up after sleeping through the more than usually drunken Republican frat party of 2001-2009, in which Republicans blew up the deficit and destroyed America’s reputation fighting two losing wars against miscellaneous and shifting groups of amorphous ragheads who, we were told relentlessly, “wanted to kill us.”

Last week, Gingrich compared supporters of the mosque to Nazis. Appearing on Fox & Friends, Gingrich said, “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.”

Doesn’t this quote kinda disprove Scarborough’s theory that Republicans would be worried about being embarrassed, sometime in the supposedly reality-based future?  You’d think.  But it gets worse.

Prior to that, Gingrich argued that the mosque shouldn’t be built near Ground Zero until churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia.

Great minds evidently all think alike; approximately two dozen prominent Republicans, including our very own Nailheadtom, have all proudly babbled essentially the same thing, despite the fact that such idiotic blather has no bearing whatsoever on any of the issues involved.

“This is demagoguery of the first order,” Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said Monday. “And people in the Republican Party need to separate themselves from these voices.”

Apparently one of Scarborough’s many flunkies just looked up “demagoguery” and explained the term to him.

“And I talk to you, my Republican brethren,” he said into the camera. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll be my brethren. I’ll be honest. I’m looking for a conservative party that actually believes in small government and not engaging in Wilsonian wars but that’s another discussion.”

This is probably the one moment here of actual courage.  Scarborough’s been around long enough to learn that you can bash liberals all day long, no matter how scurrilously or falsely and keep your MSM sinecure forever, but just once tell the smallest truth about a righty, or worse, all of them, and you’d better be updating your resume.  You can tell he’s as nervous as a whore in church as he continues:

“I’m just talking, you know, as a friend,” Scarborough continued. “I promise you this. You’re going to be embarrassed. You’re going to look back two, three, four years from now and this is going to be dark blot on your record if you don’t speak out against New Gingrich and the voices of hate.”

Too bad he’s talking to the Mean Girls, who you can bet are already texting like mad.  In four years, they’ll all have their MRS’s, whether to Cato, Heritage, Koch, or what have you, and will be too busy shopping to think about the Bad Old Days.

“This is an embarrassment and you need to speak out against it,” he said.

…As the pigs flew past 30Rock.

Opponents of the mosque protested in lower Manhattan Sunday. Daisy Khan, the wife of the controversial imam backing the Islamic center, said Sunday that opposition was “like a metastasized anti-Semitism.”

MSNBC’s Willie Geist told Scarborough that the opposition is proof that anti-Muslim sentiment is worse now than after Sept. 11, 2001.

“It shows us that we are probably farther backward that we were maybe even nine years ago in our interfaith relations,” said Geist.

Ya think?  As Glenn Greenwald pointed out today, the “Islamophobia” that Ron Paul also decried is the direct product of cynical, race-baiting post-9/11 Republican politics, and it got them two wars, two elections, and worked their base into a paranoid but electorally advantageous bloodlust ever since.  What, exactly, are the chances that such a thoroughly discredited political movement is going to drop a thing like that?  (circles of thumb and forefinger around each eye…)

Scarborough has evidently missed a great deal of what is happening in America since he went on TV, not unlike almost all of his colleagues.  Who in the media, Joe, these utopian few years away, would ever deign to call any Republican out for their past failures, given that no one ever does, despite the fact that there are kind of a lot of them?

Embarrassment is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and if you watch Morning Joe on a regular basis, you’ll see that for Republicans, it’s no longer operative.  Someone send Joe the memo.

“At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker.  A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified ‘reports’ that Park51 has ‘money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.’  As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family.  Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $7 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.”

- Frank Rich

- N.Y.T., 8/22/10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=opinion

Exterior from CHNN; unit at top right

Last week I went to look at a condo recently purchased by some favorite clients, to plan our attack when they take possession next month and to see what the home inspector had to say.  The unit, one of four penthouses on the top (26th) floor, is big, bright, and airy, with two balconies; one facing west toward CHNN World Headquarters and one facing south toward Marquam Hill and  South Waterfront, between which the space-age aerial tram zips back and forth.

Living room and west balcony

The building, one of three built as apartments in the 1960′s, are your basic International Style for which the architects, Skidmore Owings Merrill, are rightly famous, or infamous, as the case may be.

The district, just to the east of me, is part of a more than 60-block urban renewal district that was flattened to make way for the sort of “Towers in a Park” concept so popular at the time, and as a kid I thought the lookalike towers, then painted vanilla, looked like something in Beirut before the shelling.  Over time, though, the trees in the surrounding pedestrian malls grew, the holes in the area filled in with retail and University expansion, the streetcar went in, and after all these years it has become a quite attractive neighborhood.

View of downtown from west balcony

In 2006, the apartments were converted, quite elegantly, to condos.  The cheesy aluminum sliders were replaced with super high efficiency European doors and windows, the buildings were painted in muted but interesting colors, and the kitchens remodeled in tasteful gold slab granite and dark wood with stainless steel appliances.   Unfortunately, they left the cheesy doors, and didn’t try to change the cramped rabbit warren of the bedrooms and bathrooms, so we’re going to have to move things around a bit back there.  I’ll post pictures as this complicated endeavor develops.

St. Johns bridge in distance

The views are quite spectacular; as one would expect from the 26th floor in a city where the tallest building is 43 floors; one rarely sees the picturesque St. Johns Bridge because of its location a few miles from downtown, but from their west balcony they can see the whole thing.  I was envious, of course, as I looked across the park at my 13th-floor balcony, which seemed so small, low and pitiful by comparison, but I’ll get over it.

CHNN World Headquarters

If I’m too lazy to walk the five blocks to get there, or it’s raining, I can take the streetcar.

Having been in the construction business for over 20 years, I have never seen a more perfect storm hit my industry as the one we’re in now.  The overbuilding, chastened banks, excess supply, frightened homeowners, and mind-boggling paper losses have never happened all at once, and certainly not all across the country, in both the residential and commercial sectors.  In short, this is a shit storm.   Time was, the worst case scenario for a victim of a building bust was to move, but today this is no longer possible; virtually every major metropolitan area in the US will be building things at shadows of their peaks for decades, leaving countless relatively well-paid construction workers to seek employment elsewhere in the unlikely event that they can find any.  In the biggest boom towns of the bubble, Miami, Seattle, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, even Portland, and on and on, most of the jobs simply aren’t coming back, leaving the number of workers thus permanently displaced in the tens of thousands, and a legacy of unemployment and ruined lives that will haunt those cities for a generation, at least.

Given these sobering facts, I was astonished to read this article in the New York Daily News today, by Samuel Goldsmith:

A growing number of New York construction workers are vowing not to work on the mosque planned near Ground Zero.

“It’s a very touchy thing because they want to do this on sacred ground,” said Dave Kaiser, 38, a blaster who is working to rebuild the World Trade Center site.

This, from a guy who only has a job due to a lot of fake sentiment over 9/11 that led to a bizarre desire to build millions of square feet of completely unwanted office space and a cheesy underground mall on the actual site of Ground Zero, and the government money to pay him to do it.

“I wouldn’t work there, especially after I found out about what the imam said about U.S. policy being responsible for 9/11,” Kaiser said.

Ron Paul and others have said the exact same, correct thing, but Paul is white and Christian, so it’s different.

The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the “Hard Hat Pledge” on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

“Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country,” said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. “People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there.”

They’re refusing to work?  I thought only liberals and their darky co-conspirators did that.

“Hopefully, this will be a tool to get them to move it,” he said. “I got a problem with this ostentatious building looming over Ground Zero.”

Which would be pretty difficult to do, given the blocks of taller buildings between, but it does make a nice image.  (No drawings of the project have been even drawn, so whatever ostentation involved exists only in this addled mind…)  In fact, Park Place is one of the many streets near the World Trade Center site that weren’t too nice even before that ruinous Urban Renewal project flattened the area and cast it in the shadow of those crappy 70′s behemoths that were useful to New Yorkers only as a compass in the winding streets below the grid.  Since 9/11, the whole area has languished even more due to lack of foot traffic, and any development that brought people and wallets to the area would surely be appreciated by all concerned.  This guy clearly lives somewhere else.

A planned 13-story community center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, Park51 has exploded into a national debate.

That is, Sarah Palin actually noticed it, and the media blindly followed.

Louis Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, said unions have not yet taken a “formal position” on Park51, but he understands why members would be hesitant to work there.

“It’s a very difficult dilemma for the contractors and the organized labor force because we are experiencing such high levels of unemployment,” he said. “Yet at the same time, this is a very sacred sight to the union guys.”

“There were construction workers killed on 9/11 and many more who got horribly sick cleaning up Ground Zero,” Coletti said. “It’s very emotional.”

The guy from the union at least has the sense to try to stay out of a “controversy” that will directly harm his members, and uses the term “emotional” in the same way I would say “batshit crazy,” so I’m willing to forgive his chickenshittedness this once, but only barely.  He blithely ignores the fact that just a few weeks ago Republicans, who are so aggressively trumpeting this issue, petulantly and dishonestly voted down health care for Ground Zero cleanup workers.

L.V. Spina, a Manhattan construction worker who created anti-mosque stickers that some workers are slapping on their hardhats, said he would “rather pick cans and bottles out of trash cans” than build the Islamic center near Ground Zero.

Wear gloves.

“But if they moved it somewhere else, we would put up a prime building for these people,” he said. “Hell, you could do it next to my house in Rockaway Beach, I would be fine with it. But I’m not fine with it where blood has been spilled.”

The possibility that such an idiot could be a part of building a “prime building” is laughable.

Spina, who sells 9/11 apparel on his website, said he’s printed thousands of stickers and plans to produce thousands more.

“They’re going all over the country,” he said. “They got pretty popular fast.”

No trailer park in America doesn’t sport at least one.

Popularity aside, there are some construction workers choosing not to set themselves against the project.

Some?  You mean L.V. from Rockaway perhaps isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier?

“Hundreds of guys here are wearing stickers as a sign of protest, but I’m on the fence about it,” said Frank Langan, 50, a site superintendent from Queens working at Ground Zero.

“It’s a tough debate,” he said. “I sympathize with workers’ position, but at the same time, you can’t single out all Muslims because of a small number of terrorists.”

Hearing that makes me feel guilty for my almost Randian arguments thus far, which centered around the economic self-destructiveness of these dimwitted rednecks digging their own graves out of something that could be politely called emotional, but boils down to what Nixon spotted all those years ago:  those dumb “Hard Hats” can be cynically manipulated by appeals to tribal instincts.  Turns out not all of them can, and Frank Langan is a sterling example.  Unlike so many other 50-somethings in this latest Republican-created economic  disaster, at least Langan won’t be digging through trash cans any time soon.