A Two State Solution. For The Taliban GOP/Tea Party & Everyone Else.

You think the Middle East is locked in a cultural stalemate? Heh, look in your own backyard. If this isn't a clone of the Israeli/Palestinian deadlock, I don't know what is. The Taliban Tea Party - hey, you have to admire how much power they wield for such an incoherent minority - has driven this country to the brink of madness and the only way to fix this is just like the Middle East. The only solution is a two state solution. Here it is: Give them the South - except for Louisiana because we don't them to fuck up New Orleans.

Ok, so there are some nice folks in the South. We'll give them ample time to get themselves together to emigrate to the Normal North. Then, we will build a 'separation barrier', as it's called in Israel, exactly like the wall they have between Israel and the West Bank, and exactly like the one them Tea Baggers want along the border with Mexico. Nobody will bother them. They can carry on and do whatever the fuck they please, shoot guns at will, use magic potions for healthcare and thrive on a meth-based economy. President Ted Cruz can even be the paternal, insane dictator of the United States of Tea Party he so desperately wants to be and those Tea Baggers can say god whenever they goddam please and pray all day long...cause they're gonna need it.

The Two State Solution can't come soon enough because, just as the Middle East can explode at any time, so too, can this cultural ticking time bomb between the Tea Baggers and Everyone Else erupt while we are all passively sitting around wringing our hands. 

I wrote about the Taliban Tea Party back on April 8, 2011 and here it is again as it still stands:

Tea Party Taliban Imposing Sharia-like Law

With the imminent shutdown of the government by the Teabaggers - make no mistake, they are the ones whose intractability is pushing this country to the brink - they are beginning to look a lot like a cult enacting their own type of Sharia law by imposing their repressive and regressive moral code onto all of us 'non-believers'. NO health screenings for women, NO sex education in school, NO abortion counseling or abortion funding NO matter how you got pregnant, NO arts funding, "Waste of money!", NO learning to read, write or 'rithmetic, "Cut education funding. Now!" It's the uneducated hating to learn anything because it might upset their vacuous core 'values'. And god forbid anyone else should read a book and find out that the Philistine Teabaggers are all full of shit. NO climate change. NO birth certificate. NO government. NONONONONO. 

So, the Tea Party is taking a page out of the Al Qaeda handbook. For al-Qaeda, Sharia represents a perfect system for ordering human affairs. And for the Taliban Tea Party, that is exactly how they want the system to be: no room for diversity of thought, a strict adherence to their commandments or punishment by slow asphyxiation of the mind by depriving one of books, classrooms and learning. They want a country devoid of creative thinking, going down the slippery slope to next banning hip hop, all languages but bad English, and just shooting immigrants on site.

Wikipedia calls the Tea party an American populist party and goes on to describe Populism, as a political philosophy urging social and political system change that favors "the people" over "the elites", or favors the common people over the rich and wealthy business owners. Read that, per the Tea Party, as deriding anything that can help “the people” like crushing collective bargaining (I wonder if they know about the Triangle Fire and other apocalyptic worker tragedies and child labor that would still be going on today if it weren’t for collective bargaining aka unions.) And read that as the Tea Party turning the other cheek with regard to obscene corporations, “the elites” (the Kochs), making out like Jesse James in Vegas. As usual, they have everything ass-backwards. 

Here’s their mission from their website: “A community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!” Yes! With an exclamation mark 'n all! It’s like somebody in grade two wrote it. Or the Republican caucus. Meaningless drivel, and yet the political muscle of their miniscule minions is stupefying.

Obama & Kerry, Lighting the Powderkeg, Pushing U.S. Into Prideful Mid-East War

Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, it is said that Pride is the Mother of them all:
In almost every list, pride (Latin, superbia), or hubris (Greek), is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and the source of the others. SOURCE

Can you think of any more prideful reasons for 'surgically bombing' Syria than those spewed forth from John Kerry and Barack Obama than:
* invoking the hideous videos of gassed civilians? Where were videos of Iraq war vets' coffins coming home? Didn't they hide them so they could keep the war machine chugging? Now they're using videos of agonizing deaths of innocent civilians as though they are more horrible than our dead soldiers who took bullets and all nature of other gruesome killing devices.
* The strike would be 'proportional' - what the hell does that mean? Proportional to what? Their misguided Pride and bloated Egos? They should both wear a scarlet "W" on their foreheads.
* The now oft repeated 'international norms' - which bloody 'international norms'? The ones they keep changing to fit their needs? 
* The fact that chemical weapons were used on children. Children! Forget about the adults. Repeating, ad nauseum, that children died. Using children and women to try and tug at our heart strings. 'Men' just muddy the waters when it comes to making their argument.

The Powder-Keg Twins plus John McCain continually talk about how NOT going to war is undermining the credibility of the United States. What credibility? What are they smoking?
Here's just one link to test that credibility:
10 Chemical Weapons Attacks Washington Doesn't Want You to Talk About

I'm sick of hearing how different this will be than the Iraq war. (Again, going on record as having marched against that war too.) To me, this 'strike', as they call it and insist it's not war, has the possibility of being even more incendiary than Iraq, worse that Afghanistan. This could be the match that lights the powder-keg in the mid-east. 

Why? Because of Pride. Boys playing in the sandbox Pride. Seventh grade Pride. Dick Pride. We've heard it all before. This is a conflagration waiting to happen. Yes, the UN is completely useless. That said, all diplomatic efforts have not been exhausted through U.S. channels apparently. Pressure for diplomatic talks needs to be applied like a tourniquet on these Prideful Politicians. And pressure to give more aid to the refugees. That is where the U.S. can restore some credibility. Help the people who are alive.

Krulak’s law is simple: Soldiers in the field interacting with local people are the most important element of nation building and counter insurgency. SOURCE

Obama and Kerry and the war machine can save face - which is like a little gift to prideful people who make egregious, impulsive mistakes - when the House votes against it. The War Twins can rail and thrash about how terrible it is that Congress voted not to give them war powers but then they can pretend to meekly turnaround and abandon their foolishness. If only Obama and Kerry meant it when they talk about representing the will of 'the American people' instead of saying that 'the American people' just don't understand and have to be told what to think. How much more paternalistic can you get?

Stop the world. I want to get off. 

UPDATE:
Saved by Russia? Did Russia intentionally wait til the last moment to act as savior to the United States? If so, warmongers will say this proves that saber rattling works. Sigh.

Will Obama Succumb to Pressure by the Nattering Nabobs of the Press?

You remember that famous phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" uttered by the infamous Spiro Agnew? You don't? It's worth looking up. And it's the one time I have ever agreed with a Republican...and it had to be Agnew, but there you go. The LA Times even posted my letter of support, way back when. William Safire actually wrote those definitive words for Agnew and here's why:

The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority. Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes -- conservative, liberal, centrist -- don't believe the "nattering nabobs of negativism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers. In the long run, a New Media is emerging that may ultimately prove to be better than what it is replacing, but in the meantime the cost to America in the journalism that was lost during the run-up to the Iraq war and Wall Street's hijacking of the U.S. economy is incalculable.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Nabobs_natter_about_the_passing_of_William_Safire_1929-2009.html#8Ezvo5kA7k4ljeGw.99

The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority. Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes -- conservative, liberal, centrist -- don't believe the "nattering nabobs of negativism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers. In the long run, a New Media is emerging that may ultimately prove to be better than what it is replacing, but in the meantime the cost to America in the journalism that was lost during the run-up to the Iraq war and Wall Street's hijacking of the U.S. economy is incalculable.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Nabobs_natter_about_the_passing_of_William_Safire_1929-2009.html#8Ezvo5kA7k4ljeGw.99

The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority. 

Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes -- conservative, liberal, centrist -- don't believe the "nattering nabobs of negativism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers. In the long run, a New Media is emerging that may ultimately prove to be better than what it is replacing, but in the meantime the cost to America in the journalism that was lost during the run-up to the Iraq war and Wall Street's hijacking of the U.S. economy is incalculable. SOURCE

And here they go again. Saying Obama will be considered "weak", his "legacy will be tarnished" if he doesn't go to war. No, his legacy will be 'burnished' if he doesn't go to war. This is insanity. The press - by the way, who the fuck are they? Why does anybody even care what they think? They are simply glorified prompter readers ascribed an exalted understanding of 'what's happening now' - and they are  playing bait and switch with their opinions. How they have the temerity to call Obama weak, at this point, because he is reluctant to go to war is breathtaking. As often as I have disagreed with the President, in this case, getting Congress' approval or disapproval is a brilliant strategic tactic, to get those loud-mouthed do-nothing paid political hacks on record so they can put up or shut up and quit taunting Obama about how his foreign policy is screwed if he doesn't blow up the Middle East. Conscript these malingerers. The army needs more recruits.

It's not just the issues like 'we can't afford another war', 'the money would be better spent on education', 'the U.S. isn't the world's police', 'we have war fatigue'. No. NO, war is not the answer. You've heard this before and certainly after all recent wars, what have we got? Nothing and more war. The country is starving for the dollars we spend on the military. Any high-flying CEO would be fired if his ROI came in with nothing in the annual report. We know that the economy is dependent on the industrial war machine, right? But war solves nothing. And yet, the self-righteous "nattering nabobs of negativism", particularly on CNN, are stoking their war cries with twisted logic.

When a four star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, is reluctant to go to war, then listen to the Pentagon. I can't believe I just wrote that. But there you have it.

The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority. Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes -- conservative, liberal, centrist -- don't believe the "nattering nabobs of negativism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers. In the long run, a New Media is emerging that may ultimately prove to be better than what it is replacing, but in the meantime the cost to America in the journalism that was lost during the run-up to the Iraq war and Wall Street's hijacking of the U.S. economy is incalculable.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Nabobs_natter_about_the_passing_of_William_Safire_1929-2009.html#8Ezvo5kA7k4ljeGw.99