Cocktailhag, the blog

I just don’t know what it is about Republicans and the 1950′s, but you may rest assured it isn’t the top tax rate of 91%, the high rate of unionization, or even Ike and Mamie.  No, the things they like about the 1950′s are all the things normal people recognize today as, tacky, retrograde, and short-sighted.  Segregation, suburban sprawl, social conformity, DDT, atomic anything, apron-clad housewives, gas guzzlers, and Joe McCarthy; these are the things that, to the admittedly addled Republican mind, made America great.

This weird and selective nostalgia became clear during the dark and equally discredited George W. Bush era, when “the 60′s” became shorthand for everything that went wrong with America to this day.  If only a re-imagined past before darkies, hippies, and broads got so uppity could be somehow restored, everything would be, well, hunky-dory.  Never mind that the reason so many 1950′s notions fell by the wayside was because they had failed so catastrophically; devastating urban riots exposed the racial and class divides that emptied out and impoverished once-prosperous cities, choking smog and rivers catching fire made a mockery of  “progress” that relied on heedless environmental destruction, a futile and bloody war cost 58,000 Americans and countless southeast Asians their lives, and a merciless pogrom against purported domestic “enemies” ruined hundreds of lives and careers while “exposing” a few romantic malcontents whose only crime was once wanting a better world than what was being relentlessly advertised on the TV.

Former war criminal and current fascist nutcase Allen West (R-Florida) is too young and too stupid to have any real grasp of what the McCarthy era was actually like, but he nonetheless embraces it with both pistol-whipping arms.  Forget sock hops, tail fins and Leave it to Beaver;  what makes West long for the age before Aquarius is the sleazy showmanship of a booze-addled lowlife from Wisconsin whose name is synonymous with fear-mongering and character assassination.  Ronald Reagan, who first popularized nostalgia for an airbrushed version of the 50′s, at least did so from the perspective of actually have been there; today’s 50′s fetishists have no such excuse.

If West had two brain cells to rub together, he would realize that his very presence in the House is a product of the racial progress that finally began in the 1960′s, just as the fact that he’s able to live in, much less represent, a suburban district in a Jim Crow state like Florida would have been impossible without the pioneering efforts of, gasp, the Communist Party, which in his idealized mid-century was virtually alone in championing equal rights for black Americans.  Ignorance, in this case, is the opposite of bliss; it’s just ignorance.

But not for West, who proudly told an audibly groaning audience that “78-81″ members of Congress were members of the Communist Party, by which he meant members of the Progressive Caucus.  Forgive him for conflating “progressive” and “communist;” what little he knows he learned from Glenn Beck.  Actual commies, to their credit, were pretty unimpressed, (from Politico:) “I just think it’s an absurd way to cast a shadow over his colleagues. It’s kind of a sad ploy,” Libero Della Piana, a vice-chairman of the national Communist Party, said of the Florida Republican’s charge that about 80 House Democrats were members of the radical party.

Undaunted, a West flunky, which is considerably worse than just a regular flunky, doubled down, not unexpectedly.  He whined to, who else, The Daily Caller:

“One stupid reporter with a local publication misquoted the entire thing, and they all jumped on one press account without verifying,” said West’s campaign manager Tim Edson, referring to the original report in the Palm Beach Post . “It’s all typical West Wing marching orders for their friends in the press.”

Edson continued: “The real point is these people speak for themselves, and if you listen to the words of the Progressive Caucus it’s clear that these people are opponents of capitalism — they oppose free markets, they oppose individual economic freedom — so you can call them whatever you want — whether they’re socialists or Marxists or communists.” To “prove” his point, whatever that could have been, he released the above video, which is anything but exculpatory.

Who, pray tell, are they calling stupid?

Faced with the strong possibility of losing (again) in his home state, Rick Santorum has done the brave, or rather, cowardly thing and dropped out of the race, thereby preserving his all-important wingnut welfare career.  While this comes as no great surprise for those of us who knew he never had a chance, by which I mean everyone in the world not named Rick Santorum, the media nonetheless treated this as big, breaking news.

Fortunately, his abrupt if belated departure leaves Mitt Romney thoroughly smeared with frothy mixture that will be difficult to remove.  The War on Women is in full swing, even as the dangerously emboldened God-bothering right is beginning to notice that Romney is, well, part of a “cult” that doesn’t believe in such nonsense as the Holy Trinity and whatnot.   Santorum hasn’t accomplished much in his dreary little life, so making the Republicans radioactive has to count as one of his greatest achievements, albeit an unintentional one.

Now Romney’s only remaining “competition” is Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, which would be a nice problem to have if he were anyone but, well, Mitt Romney.  I’m looking forward to the nasty, money-drenched campaign I expected all along between Republican Lite and Republican Crazy, where no one wins except the TV stations running all the annoying ads.  Yippee.

One of the great advantages of having spent an embarrassingly large amount of my disposable income over a quarter century on books is that the darn things just never stop coming in handy.  Although lack of space, blogging, and less travel in the last few years has sharply slowed my acquisition rate, for each Presidency from Nixon to Bush II, the two or three overstuffed shelves I have for each invariably offer treasure troves of both contemporary reporting and later scholarship, which is the good news.  The bad news is how painfully clear it is that so few members or our media appear to have read any of them.

While I’m fully aware that, say, Ruth Marcus doesn’t live within walking distance of Powell’s, she nonetheless gets paid handsomely to occupy with her empty blather a considerable chunk of op-ed pages across the country a couple times a week; I type away at CHNN and, lately, Firedoglake.com for free, but unlike Ruthie, I bother to do my homework.  Not only does it help me avoid the kind of humiliating blunders she made last week; It’s fun.  (My mother, rest her soul, would be so proud to hear me say that…)  You see, if Ruthie had a library of her own, along with a mad yet methodical system of dog-earing and footnoting as I do and wasn’t afraid to use it, she wouldn’t have made a more than usually complete ass of herself for all the world to see.

While Ruthie was munching on Village cocktail weinies, or perhaps having a much-needed session with Mitch McConnell’s personal trainer, I was delving into the sordid history of our current Supreme court, and it isn’t a pretty picture.  Thus,  she was “stopped cold” by Obama’s studiously mild admonition of the court’s right wing, while I, a week before, had both predicted the outcome and outlined the craven motivations of the notorious actors involved.   When a righty nutcase Reagan-appointed judge predictably went all Glenn Beck on Obama the next day, she had to type up a pretty awkward mea culpa for her harebrained scribbles, and even go on TV to promote it, while I was free to devote myself to the more worthy and urgent endeavors of drinking to excess and demolishing kitchens.

It’s possible, though unlikely, that Ruthie reads books, but it seems indisputable that she doesn’t keep them around for future reference if she does.  Not only could I have pulled out Alan Dershowitz’s Supreme Injustice from 2001, I also had on hand Robert Bork’s astonishingly unhinged 1990 screed, The Tempting of America, as well as many more that amply illustrated the systematic politicization of the Court under recent Republican Presidents, and could have helped save her from her wanton and laughably premature typing.  But she didn’t call.

She also could have skimmed Michael Schaivo’s book about his brain-dead wife and the startlingly sinister Republican assault on the judiciary she spawned, which make abundantly clear what an actual threat to the separation of powers looked like, but I guess she had a deadline, or maybe a mani-pedi.  Both John Cornyn and Tom DeLay explicitly warned at the time that “unelected” judges ought to fear righteous violence against them, but that inconsequential episode was lost in the fog of ancient history; i.e., 2005, for Ruth and her “editors” at the WaPoo.

Probably the most important book I have that could have saved Ruth from herself is one I just picked up for the second time, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer’s 1994 exhaustive analysis of the Clarence Thomas (continuing) fiasco, Strange Justice. I’m only a few dozen pages into it, but I’ve already encountered enough evidence of a right-wing conspiracy to foist an unqualified opportunist on an unsuspecting nation by the most cynical means imaginable that I really need only skim my margin notes to set up a whole remedial history course for Ruth.

Since the liberal media, including Ruth’s hapless employer, got the story so shamefully wrong when it mattered, that is, before a bitter and perverted nincompoop was elevated to a lifetime seat on the High Court, Mayer and Abramson helpfully tried to set the record straight for those of us who cared to see it straightened.  Unsurprisingly, they proved that Thomas was in fact the sexist, authoritarian, pathological liar Anita Hill accused him of being, traits only exacerbated under oath; but he was also a man whose stunning lack of judicial temperament didn’t belong in any courtroom, except perhaps as a defendant.  Scalia, Roberts, and Alito are just nicer looking peas in the same rancid pod;  the strategies, goals, and even the people behind them are virtually identical, a fact utterly lost on not just Ruthie, but virtually all the media.

It reminds me of a play I produced in the 80′s called The Housekeeper, wherein a homeless grifter wiles her way into the affections (and home) of a stuffy and pretentious failed “author,” recently bereft of his mother who amply supported him.  I envision the first interview between Donald Graham and Ruthie just like the first scene of the play, when the potential housekeeper gamely fakes an interest in literature:

DG: (delightedly) I’m always so happy to meet a fellow traveler in Terris Librorum.

RM: (uncertainly shifting in her chair) I’ve been all over.

No, Ruthie, you haven’t, much to the detriment of your readers, and your own credibility.

Yesterday Media Matters had a little fun with Heather Childers, a Fox News “anchor,” who posted some interesting tweets about how President Obama just might have threatened to kill Chelsea Clinton back in 2008, to cover up the fact that he was a Kenyan Muslim and all.  No, seriously.  Here’s the tweet in question:

Now, a lot of you might be thinking, “Wow.  That’s pretty cuckoo.”  And you’d be right.  But after all, this isn’t a normal news outfit we’re talking about.  The deeper problem, though, emerges once she’s called out by Media Matters, and in a stunning volley of further twitterrhea, she continues: “I know Media Matters strives 2b FACTUALLY correct so attach the article plz. I was asking 4 opinion.” Okay, I know kids these days speak in this sort of tech-Esperanto, but if you’re a supposed journalist, or at least trying mightily to play one on TV, is this considered an appropriate and professional response to valid criticism?

Media Matters, of course, prides itself on its meticulous fairness, often to a fault, so they asked her to respond via email.  Evidently already worn out from all that typing, she simply re-tweeted the same Churchillian comment.  Later, after wracking her brain for a snappy fair n’ balanced comeback, she tweeted some more:  4 the record-if you modify a tweet don’t make it sound like my opinion.. if I have attached an article and asked 4 opinions Ooh, did she ever show those MMFA commies with that one.

Minutes later, she had another, unrelated but equally profound thought to share:  My Opinion- Obama’s tone unchanged in 2day’s speech.  Make no mistake he’s warning SCOTUS 2 listen 2 him You have to hand it to her; she parrots the talking points like, well, a parrot.  She quickly followed up with another brilliant insight, eloquently delivered:  Obama- “We spend more on healthcare without as good outcomes as other nations.”  Really?  I’ll take my chances w healthcare n the USA! Of course, we know that Fox News personalities enjoy generous benefits, and not just cosmetology; Megyn Kelly famously bragged about her paid maternity leave, and in complete sentences, to boot.

It took a few minutes, but Heather came up with what she evidently thought was an historical perspective on the Supreme Court.  As you might expect, it didn’t go well:  Thoughts? President Obama channels Joseph Stalin and Attacks Supreme Court Justices- Godfather Politics The alert reader, or even a barely sentient one, might quibble that Obama was actually channeling every Republican since, say, 1963, or schoolmarmishly point out that Stalin’s first name was “Josef,” since he was Russian and all.

But Heather has already moved on, back to her original “scoop” about death threats:  Thoughts?  Did Obama Campaign Threaten Chelsea Clinton’s Life 2 Keep Parents Silent?  Godfather Politics: You see, as she put it in her original “defense” of the link to a more than usually bonkers conspiracy theory from a previously obscure birther website, she’s not necessarily endorsing the theory; she’s just asking for “thoughts.”  It’s the twitter equivalent of “some say.”

Eventually, she just got tired of the whole thing and typed: This country is great BC the people ur talking about knew the value of a dollar and worked HARD for it!!  NOT from handouts!! #work!! #earn!! The irony here, given that she’s a highly paid television celebrity, is utterly lost on her.  But what she lacks in brains, she more than makes up for in peevish self-righteousness; here are some random responses to the predictably critical tweets that came in, before she deleted the original tweets, natch:

Here’s the thing folks….that ONE topic sure got a lot of you tweeting. I apologize if the article offended anyone.  Very Interesting. Here Heather is using “interesting” in the same curious way George Bush used to; to imply he knew something his critics didn’t, and that’s why he was right and they were wrong.  It didn’t work for Bush, and it isn’t working for her, but that didn’t stop her from hauling out another equally shopworn Republican “defense,” faux victimhood:   Name calling… nice.  Nice conversation, folks.  Does anyone have an actual point to make? wow so many VERY angry people. “Appalled” is too big a word for her limited vocabulary, so “angry” will have to do.

Perhaps sensing she was digging a rather large hole for herself, she tries to wrap it up with a little Kumbaya:  All opinions & All conversations r welcome on this page- barring profanity. 1 rule- B respectful of others opinions. Conversations=good. Now, I don’t want to sound sexist, but this halfwit makes Al Franken’s character, Amber Waves, the Republican stripper, sound like Aristotle.  It turned out to be even a bit much for Fox, which is saying something.  Senior Vice President for News (!) Michael Clemente released a statement:  The tweets have been addressed with Heather and she understands this was a mistake. She does?  How did he explain it to her?  With a felt board?

Crybaby Paul Ryan threw himself on the floor today, blubbering and screaming, about how mean ol’ President Obama called his ludicrous, gilded age budget what it is: “laughable.”  Worse, he also called it a “Trojan Horse” and “thinly-veiled social Darwinism.”  That both these things are true escapes lil’ Paul, since he was too busy masturbating to Atlas Shrugged when he should have been reading The Iliad, and everyone knows all Republicans hate Darwin.   Unwittingly describing George W. Bush to a “T,” Ryan whined  (from Politico):

“History will not be kind to a president who, when it came time to confront our generation’s defining challenge, chose to duck and run,” Ryan said. “The president refuses to take responsibility for the economy and refuses to offer a credible plan to address the most predictable economic crisis in our history.

“Like his reckless budgets, today’s speech by President Obama is as revealing as it is disappointing: While others lead by offering real solutions, he has chosen to distort the truth and divide Americans in order to distract from his failed record,” added Ryan, who is in Wisconsin campaigning with Mitt Romney ahead of Tuesday’s primaries there. “His empty promises are quickly becoming broken promises – and the American people will hold him accountable for this violation of their trust.”

I see.  Obama’s just a spending machine, hurling trillions at futile, lost wars while cutting taxes on the wealthiest, and racking up the worst job growth record since Herbert Hoover.  He also chose to “divide Americans in order to distract from his failed record,” and as a cherry on top of this BS sundae, Ryan promises Americans will hold Obama accountable.”  Earth to Ryan:  that was the last guy.  And deficits wouldn’t be a “defining challenge” had the Worst President in American History not deliberately chosen to run them up.

Facts don’t matter to Republicans, of course, and the easiest guide to deciphering their BS is, as Harry Reid once trenchantly commented, “Whatever they say, believe the opposite.”  Ryan isn’t a smart man, but he does know the drill: accuse your opponents of whatever it is you’re doing, and chances are that the dumbest elements in America, the Republican base, will believe you.  Ryan’s pathetic excuse for a budget makes no effort to tackle the deficit; indeed it increases it by trillions of dollars, while literally taking from everyone else to hand more money to the rich.

Predictably, other Republicans piled on, as they are wont to do.  Here’s another, documented, crybaby, House Speaker (!) John Boehner:

“If the president were serious, he would put forward a plan to deal with our debt crisis and save Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for future generations of seniors without raising taxes on small businesses that are struggling in this economy,” Boehner said in a statement. “Instead, he has chosen to campaign rather than govern, and the debt crisis he is presiding over is only getting worse.”

Remember when these Republicans fretted about huge tax cuts, unfunded wars, and a multibillion dollar giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies called Medicare part D?  Me neither.  Back then, it was verboten to even mention deficits, because every cockamamie right-wing idea simply had to be adopted, budget be damned.  And far from “saving” Social Security and Medicare, Ryan’s “budget” eviscerates the latter while making inevitable the collapse of the former.  The only part of the budget held harmless is, naturally, the bloated “Defense” budget, which Ryan wants to increase by $500 billion.  To defend this demented idea, Ryan went so far as to call the Pentagon’s top generals liars, and was forced into a humiliatingly abject apology days later, an experience from which he has clearly learned nothing.

Whatever the Village has to say about Obama’s new aggressiveness in calling out the GOP (and Howard Fineman has already reached for the smelling salts),  whenever Paul Ryan and John Boehner start caterwauling so piteously, it’s a good day for the President, lame though he often is.

Better late than never.

One thing you can say about the “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court: their definition of “freedom” is decidedly not the one you’d find in Webster’s.  Last week, “freedom” meant the God-given right to die in the gutter of preventable illness; this week it means the “freedom” to have cops look under your balls, literally, whether or not you’ve committed any crime.  I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.  From the WaPoo:

The case was brought by Albert Florence, a New Jersey man who said he was subjected to two invasive inspections in 2005 after being mistakenly arrested for not paying a fine.

A state trooper pulled over Florence’s BMW in 2005 as he and his family were on the way to his mother-in-law’s to celebrate the purchase of their new home. He was handcuffed and arrested in front of his distraught, pregnant wife and young son.

He spent seven days in jail because of a warrant that said, mistakenly, he was wanted for not paying a court fine. In fact, he had proof that the fine had been paid years earlier; he said he carried it in his glove box because he believed that police were suspicious of black men who drove nice cars.

Florence was jailed in Burlington County and then Essex County, before a magistrate ordered him released. At Burlington, he said he was forced to disrobe in front of an officer and told to lift his genitals. At Essex, he was strip-searched again, and said he was made to squat and cough in front of others, a maneuver meant to expel anything hidden in a body cavity.

Understandably, this guy thought he had a pretty good case, but he fatally mis-underestimated the shameless authoritarianism of our black-robed Torquemadas.

According to “swing” justice Kennedy, who is invariably called upon to write odious opinions such as these, law enforcement ought to be able to “protect” prison populations by strip-searching new arrivals regardless of the gravity or, in this case, nonexistence, of their crimes.  You see, he’s beside himself with worry about disease, weapons, and other dangerous contraband that is, in his mind, always being smuggled into prisons by minor traffic offenders.  To bolster his case, he points out that Timothy McVeigh had been stopped for a broken tail light prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, and al Queda members had been pulled over for traffic infractions prior to Sept. 11.  I guess Kennedy thinks that Ryder trucks and commercial aircraft can be stuffed up one’s ass, with the proper lubricant, presumably.

Of course, Sam Alito concurred, but ostentatiously hauled out his “moderate” bona fides by allowing that exceptions could be made for arrestees held separately from the general prison population, since the real goal is ostensibly “protecting” other inmates.  This chickenhearted criminal-coddling was naturally pooh-poohed by Clarence “Long Dong” Thomas, who thinks everyone should be strip-searched, while he watches.  Especially the hot babes.

As I wrote last week, we no longer have a Supreme Court, we have a cabal of five fascist nutjobs working feverishly to get rid of the constitution they’re nominally charged with upholding, with all deliberate speed, if you will.  Justice Breyer wrote in his dissent that such a search was “inherently harmful, humiliating, and degrading.”  C’mon, hippie….  That’s the point.

My brother, Butts, has a birthday today…..  Tell him he looks remarkable for his age.

On some level, you have to hand it to to Governors Rick Perry of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Terry Branstad of Iowa; this may be the first known incidence of Republicans actually walking the talk, rather than, as usual, letting others do the legwork while they cash in, and eat at Morton’s afterward.  Oh, perhaps it would have been braver for them to sign up for the wars, quaff a tall glass of fracking fluid, or work a few shifts in a Massey Energy mine, but no one, including their supporters, would ever expect them to do such a thing.  So I for one have to hand it to them, actually eating, albeit probably for the first and last time, the ammonia-laced offal their meat industry supporters have been foisting on unsuspecting Americans for two decades.

Of course, they’re still Republicans, so they ham-handedly attempt to turn a discussion of revolting corporate practices into a heartfelt lament for the idled workers, whom I’m quite certain, given their experience, would no more eat pink slime than take a dip in one of the many “waste lagoons” such companies create.  As Jon Stewart so deftly pointed out, pink slime is too disgusting for McDonald’s, an eatery famously disdained by none other than Tom DeLay, so seeing Republicans praise, and better yet, eat the stuff is a glorious sight.  What’s next?  James Inhofe retiring to the Maldives?

One thing you can say about Republicans is that they are generally able to avoid the personal consequences of their own actions, which is one reason they so routinely dismiss them.  Scott Walker is never going to work in a classroom, Mitt Romney is equally unlikely to show up uninsured at an emergency room, and the chances that Rick Santorum would need birth control are vanishingly slight.  Tellingly, the two smarter ones only nibbled delicately on patties sans bun, but ol’ Rick “Oops” Perry scarfed a big hamburger like a stoned college kid.  He also posed with a t-shirt that read, “It’s beef, Dude,” which in the most technical sense, I suppose it is.  But if you have to say so, isn’t the battle already lost?

The name for this nauseating byproduct, “finely textured lean beef,” could have been, and probably was, invented by Frank Luntz, and it’s about as truthful as any of his other monikers.  Let’s just say that if you scoop the leavings off the floor when all the obviously edible parts are removed, stick it in a centrifuge (!) to extract “bone and connective tissue”,  douse it with ammonia, and then it comes out of a giant Play-Doh putty pumper to be formed into cubes and used to dilute real meat, the term isn’t exactly a descriptive as, well, pink slime.  Naturally, it isn’t this reality that offends these esteemed officials, it’s the effrontery of anyone calling something, anything, what it is, as their pompous speeches make clear.

In their calculatedly euphemized world, things themselves don’t matter, but only the words used to describe them.  (See Interrogation, enhanced, et al…)  But you can’t eat words, especially if you’re a Republican and it’s rarely necessary, even to make a spurious point for the cameras.   Sometimes, you might even have to eat pink slime, and they did.  I guess those campaign contributions will buy a lot of Pepto-Bismol.

I was all set to write a mocking post about Mitt Romney’s new house with the car elevator, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but then along comes this:

(CNN) – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tweaked Mitt Romney for his characterization of Russia as the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States, saying the comments did not reflect the current relationship between the two countries.

Ya think?

“It is very reminiscent of Hollywood and also of a certain phase in Russian-U.S. relations,” Medvedev said at the end of the nuclear security summit in South Korea Tuesday.

Who knew those dirty commies were so polite with their ridicule?

Romney made the comment to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday while criticizing President Barack Obama over his open mic moment a day earlier.

“In terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, and as of course a massive nuclear power, Russia is the geopolitical foe,” Romney said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “The idea that our president is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.”

I’m certain this interview would have looked better in the original Betamax, but it’s still pretty embarrassing.  Are we to believe Romney could run Bain Capital, successfully, without at least suspecting that Russia had been a corrupt oligarchy, much like what he’d like to have here, and had been “open for business” for decades?  Of course not.  He just thinks Republican voters are stupid, not without evidence.

Medvedev urged Romney to take the current climate into account if he hopes to win the presidential election.

“My first advice is to listen to reason when they formulate their positions. Reason never harmed a presidential candidate,” Medvedev said. “My other advice is to check their watches from time to time: it is 2012, not the mid-1970s.”

Game. Set. Match.  The commie wins and the Mormon is toast, or so you’d think.  But wait….  Like the Black Knight in Monty Python, Romney isn’t through yet:

In response, Team Romney characterized Medvedev’s comments as further evidence “the Kremlin would prefer to continue doing business with the current incumbent of the White House.”

I think I did see Boris and Natasha at that last State Dinner.

But Romney doesn’t just dig holes for himself metaphorically, sometimes, like Ginger, the dog in the Far Side, he brings in the earth movers.  1500 cubic yards of priceless oceanfront dirt will soon depart La Jolla so Romney can have a 3600 square foot basement with a car elevator.  I hear once you’ve had one you never go back.  Parking for four Cadillacs, to boot.

Better yet, he had to hire a lobbyist to get through planning and Coastal Commission, and at the early part of a multiyear process, he’s already paid him over twenty grand.  For the lobbying.  Maybe they’ll have to skimp on towel bars or something.  Disturbingly, plans also include an outdoor shower, which seems a little un-Mormon-y to me, and also forced me to imagine Mitt naked for an unpleasant moment.

Now, there’s no doubt a chorus of righty gasbags will point out, as they have previously, what a marvelous Job Creator Romney is, all by himself , but really?  A CAR ELEVATOR?  That sort of thing goes over like a fart in church in NASCAR-land, where Romney continues to lose, and he doesn’t seem to care.  He’s a proud plutocrat, which so far seems to be about the only thing he’s honest about.

He could take a little lesson from Obama about reticence before an election on touchy issues.  Better yet, a lesson from George H.W. Bush on keeping his silver foot out of his mouth.

The media is duly abuzz about the Supreme Court hearing arguments for (and agin’) Obamacare, beginning today.  But the coverage is revealing; the case is discussed solely in political terms, blandly acknowledging that the highest court in the land functions not as a neutral arbiter of “Equal Justice Under Law,” but as just another sleazy backroom where political deals are made.   Maybe they need to chisel some new words onto the front of the building. The politicization of the court is so complete that it’s no longer worthy of comment; four Republican-appointed justices are utterly immune to arguments, having made up their minds long ago, yet they sit through them anyway, for appearances, I suppose.

It should be noted that two of those Justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, wouldn’t even be on the court were it not for the original sin of Bush v. Gore, which began the rapid dismantling of the Court’s credibility for partisan ends.  The dissent in that case, as usual, proved correct when it predicted that the real loser was the American people, and the reputation of the Court itself.  Every time Scalia peevishly sneers “get over it” is a telling admission that no one has.   For the right, court appointments are just another weapon in their unending war, and the appointees never shy from a fight, even when their corrupt decisions degrade the institution and not coincidentally, make bad law.

Fortunately, widespread disgust with the Court, especially since Citizens United, seems finally to be coming home to roost; one more highly political 5-4 decision might make the next several more they have planned a bit problematic, as Dahlia Lithwick points out at Slate.  Though one of the best reporters on the subject, she treats the overtly political nature of one side of the Court as a given, rather than the outrage it is.   The point of lifetime appointments was to remove Justices from politics, but for the right it only means you should appoint your flunkies when they’re still young.   All the high minded blather they constantly spout about “original intent” of our sainted Founders studiously ignores their open defiance of their own job descriptions.

In their world, why wouldn’t you go duck hunting with Dick Cheney prior to hearing a case affecting him directly?  Why shouldn’t your wife reap millions of dollars from lobbyists with cases before the Court, and then you simply lie about it for years?  What are we going to do?  Fire them?  So far, the oily Roberts and schlumpy Alito haven’t engaged in such wanton public transgressions, but only because they’re new; the culture of impunity and political skulduggery dressed up in black robes will undoubtedly lead them into similar moral cul-de-sacs in time.

In a way, the judicial philosophies of the wingnut four perfectly mirror those of the party that groomed them, but achieve something even better: finally cutting the rabble out of the loop of governance.  In grim progression, corporations are given more power over the average citizen, which they zealously employ to further disempower them, using every trick in the book from criminalizing dissent to Catch-22 voter ID laws.  Any pushback ultimately finds its way back to, you guessed it, the Court.  Whatever decision the Court hands down in this case won’t be decided on the Commerce Clause or somesuch, it will be decided based on what makes it least likely that Obama will be reelected, yet passes the smell test of a reliably credulous media.

This Court has proven time and again that is not about jurisprudence, it is about advancing an agenda and expanding its majority.  It should no longer be seen in any other light.

Where’s Condi Rice when you need her?  As usual, pretty much everywhere; if you’re the NRA or the increasingly infamous ALEC and being exposed as the two organizations whose “charitable” activities led to the death of Trayvon Martin, you’d better be launching into a Busby Berkeley production of “No One Could Have Predicted,” maybe even with Condi herself accompanying on piano.  Because opponents of Florida’s execrable “Stand Your Ground” law predicted years ago that random, racially motivated killings would be the result of its passage, and so they are.  Cue the orchestra.

Don’t expect a lot of mea culpas from the NRA or ALEC, though; both are still pursuing similar laws in several states in the wake of the tragedy and in spite of its increasing notoriety.  They just can’t help themselves; they’ve developed a narrative and it’s working, so bodies on the pavement must be quickly whisked away while the peripheral goals of racial polarization and perceived societal breakdown work their magic in the more important economic sphere.  For them, it isn’t the principle of the thing, it’s the money.

Neither the NRA or ALEC probably set out solely to make it easier for white vigilantes to wantonly kill the dusky-hued; all they wanted to do was sell more weapons, undermine confidence in the socialist, union police, and make a play for votes in the notoriously violent old confederacy.  Both will piously decry violence while leaving unacknowledged that it is just a cost (borne by others, natch) of doing business.  Now that corporations are people, we’re quickly learning that they aren’t anyone you’d want to invite over for a potluck, and that they are also prone to incestuous couplings that produce pretty hideous offspring.

Ever since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” but accelerating massively since the phony “War on Terror,” Republican politics have moved in lock step toward a more belligerent, violent, and punishing society, and as luck would have it, there’s a plethora of corporate interests that look at this otherwise alarming development and see nothing but greenbacks.  Whether or not Make My Day America is a good thing for, well,  Americans, it’s undeniably profitable enough to fund think tanks, mount political campaigns, and further enrich wealthy oligarchs that none of them mind stepping over a corpse or two on the way to the bank.

In short, America is being torn asunder more or less accidentally as part of a comprehensive marketing campaign to sell things of dubious or negative value: guns, oil, military hardware, prisons, wars, surveillance, gold coins, you name it.  More insidiously, the same interests also see money in discrediting things of undeniable and proven value: good public schools, responsible law enforcement, free speech, privacy, racial tolerance, and protecting the environment. Freedom, as they see it, is a lot of things, but it decidedly isn’t free; it might even cost you your first born son.

Trayvon Martin was merely collateral damage in a larger war, one that ALEC and the NRA are, at least at the moment, winning.