THOU SHALT NOT BE STUPID – The Bible of Common Sense sez, “Know what you’re doing before you do it.”

Colin Powell warned the Bush administration about their twin Wars of Error with the Pottery Barn Rule – “You break it, you buy it.” Unfortunately, the Bush and Obama administrations chose long term leases with options to wreck the US economy.

In the beginning, the Crapweasel-in-Chief flexed his military muscle by starting a war on the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, Bush the Lesser’s terminal case of ADD set the table for Operation Shit in Your Mess Kit in Iraq. As it became clearer the wars, supported by the Coalition of the Inept”, were cesspools of money-sucking, people-killing swill Bush and the Big Dick Cheney doubled down on surge and puffery.

The puffery was the worst. As regular as a cheap watch Condi Rice stood with Witless George to remind us victory was just around the corner…for 3-years running. When that message flopped, as anyone with an IQ greater than a doughnut hole could see it would, the chant became, “If we leave now Iraq and Afghanistan will descend into civil war.”

Sadly, it was one of the few prescient things to come out of the whole shameful experience. A “no-duh” revelation of mammoth proportions.

We recently snuck out of Iraq in the middle of the night and even after leaving an Army of you and I paid mercenaries behind, the place is still a mess and the fighting is heating up again. The Real War has now droned on for over a decade and the Ombamulans are ready to pull the plug there.  They will find, as many other Afghan “conquerors” have found, that keeping roving bands of war lords from slitting each other’s throats just for the hell of it is a lot harder than it looks. Chaos will follow us across the bridge out of the place next year just at it did with the Soviets.

Four years too late, the Obamunist finally sees it isn’t worth pumping money into a house with a broken foundation. He is pulling back and predictably his opponents are blaming him for the “failure” of wars he didn’t start with outcomes already set and Bush revisionism spouting like a whale pod with allergies. He may be a slow learner, but his record is 8 years to 4 in the football game of failure. Just as his Senate war vote was ill-advised and cowardly it’s better to wake up late than never.

Make no mistake, we victimized ourselves with the Pottery Rule 100-fold, but crapped on the people of both places 1000-fold. We bombed Iraq back to the Stone Age and Afghanistan back to the 6,000-year old Christian creation. The places are far more dysfunctional than before we decided to “liberate” them from a workable infrastructure and all those pesky family members. The Iraqis are returning to the same feudalism that even a despot like Hussein could barely hold together. And the Afghans are, well, about the same as before.

People are blabbering about attacking far more talented Team Iran soon. Clearly some of us have forgotten that Iran soundly whipped second-string Iraq’s ass in the War Bowl. It’s time to start planning a response better than the Wars of Error debacle lest we bomb the hell out of someone with the same negative effect as Iraqistan.

It’s another stupendous, “no duh, moment”.

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GOD WANTS LOW WAGES – Pay them nothing and they will teach.

•   McGill comments get national attention,
• AEA boss gives McGill failing grade

I’ve only half-joked for years that God really needs a better PR team here in the temporal world. Some of the most log-headed charlatans, grifters, and just plain logically-challenged people claim to speak on His behalf. Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the ethically inept Newt Gingrich are just a few who work non-stop to tarnish God’s image.

Unfortunately, there’s another PR flack trying to grab a share of the ignobility. AL state Sen. Shadrack (Shadrack, really? Shadrack?) McGill is currently charming the nation’s electorate with the fanciful notion that God has issued an edict that teachers should be underpaid, perhaps as foretold in the Book of Ignoramus.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”

Oddly, though not surprisingly, McGill doesn’t extend the same “logic” to lawmakers. Last year he voted for a 62% increase in his pay.

Lawmakers: Bribed, Not Called

I suppose this illuminates his idea that lawmakers don’t need to be called to serve, they must be bribed to take on the job. It’s not unlike paying a large retention bonus to the CEO who ran the company into the ground because his expertise is essential to rebuilding the business.

But in his defense, McGill reasons that by paying lawmakers more they’re less susceptible to bribery – apparently bribery from someone other than the unbribable legislators themselves.

Head-scratcher, ain’t it?

It doesn’t do much for his credibility that he voted to tie legislators’ pay to the average Alabama teacher’s pay last year and reversed course this year. It’s OK though, flip flopping is a venerated sport at the Statehouse Country Club and the all seeing, all knowing God won’t really notice a little free play with facts.

Darby McGill and the Little People claim Alabama teachers are the 4th best paid in the country. Now I don’t know about you, but most people know that pretty much everything in Alabama education sucks a big weenie. They usually joust with Mississippi for the 49th or 50th spot in everything – although Propped 13 California is a strong up and commer. The true value of an Alabama teacher’s pay actually ranks 31st in the National Miseducation Sweepstakes.

Smite That Rascal Lord

Hey McGill, wait a minute. If that No. 4 standing is correct aren’t you overpaying teachers and attracting a bad crowd of the unmotivated kind? Shouldn’t you work harder to lower Alabam’s No. 4 ranking to 49th – or at least 45th?

If you’ll excuse a minor blasphemy…my God. If you claim to be serving as God’s on-scene commander, the least you could do is get your story straight. It might also sit better with the Big Guy if you didn’t stand behind his robes and yell, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words and actions will never haunt me.”

God, I know you and I haven’t been on a first name basis for close to 45 years now, but I like to think we at least have a workable truce. So I beseech thee, if you’re really there control people like McGill. They do a disservice to you and just really chap the pants off the rest of us – You-fearing and not fearing alike.

Smite him o’ Lord. Cast him into the fiery pit of the unelectable. Just take away his 62% pay hike before you give him the eternal shove.

Can I get an Amen?

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THE OLD HOMESTEAD – It’s not my grandparents’ shack, but it is a close facsimile. If Mitt Romney would live in a place like this for a week, I’d vote for him.

Much has been said about how multi-millionaire candidates relate to the middle class. Most of them advize Americans who are part of the shrinking middle class to simply get new  jobs. They’re understandably silent on just how to pull that off in the recession they’ve created. In their opinion, any grousing from Americans caught in the vice of diminishing means is just class warfare against the wealthy, Cayman Island, tax-dodging, outsourcing, politically powerful. BANG! You’re very poor.

No Rusty Iron Spoons for Mitt

Candidates, as often as not, speak as though the very poor don’t even exist. Much like their notion that gay soldiers didn’t exist unless you asked if they were gay. And when they infrequently talk of the working poor, it’s usually along the lines of Mitt Romney’s statement that he doesn’t worry about them because they have an adequate safety net. Fine words from a man not born with a rusty iron spoon in his mouth.

I’m very lucky. I started as a marginal middle class blue collar worker and made my way up with a lot of luck and the ability to know to jump ship when I heard the deckchairs scraping. These days, I defy the odds as an upper middle class man with a nice house, good job, health benefits, and enough money to fund a retirement and buy most anything I truly want or need (not yachts and airplanes and multiple summer “cottages” in Vail you understand) without stretching too much.

My parents were more middle-middle class. They were acutely aware that money didn’t grow on trees.  My father was one of those grossly overpaid civil servants you hear so much about these days. Even though he was lucky to have his job, his “overly generous benefits” didn’t cover my mother’s and grandmother’s schizophrenia or my sister’s bipolar illnesses. In fact, it didn’t pay for most extras and most of the disposable income was already disposed of when the check arrived.

But, just because I led a modestly middle class life doesn’t mean I’m inexperienced in the lives of the very poor.

Meet My Grandparents

The "safety net" mental hospital where my grandmother spent decades.

Meet my grandparents. They lived a life straight out of the mid-1800s. My zero grade school grandfather had no steady job because in the backwoods of the Appalachians, there weren’t any, steady or otherwise.  And my grandmother, similarly uneducated and dogged nearly all her life with multiple incarcerations in a state mental hospital that was every bit as scary as those in the mid1800s led a very hard life too.

I know. I visited her there many times and heard the screams of the “patients” and the stink of their urine while she slowly rocked in a chair almost comatose from medication.

They lived in a leaking tar-paper shack one step removed from a cardboard box. Heat and cooking fuel came from wood cut a ½ a mile up a steep embankment. During a particularly bad winter they burned one of the rooms of the house because they couldn’t reach the wood pile in hip-deep snow.

Drinking water came several times a day from a hole in the ground by bucket and was drunk with a community ladle. They bathed and washed clothes in a small creek, polluted from mine waste, behind their tar-paper manse. The outhouse was nearby where, yes, they used actual Sears catalog pages. It was a 2-holer though. They lived over a hole of luxury.

They owned a small “farm” with soil so poor they grew only potatoes and cabbage – everything else died. Meat came from the occasional chicken that stopped laying and daily hunts for squirrel, raccoon, and possum.  Once, my uncle even downed a bobcat. After my mother dropped out of school in the 8^th grade to help support the family she vowed never to eat another ‘coon. And, she never did. But, she never made it back to school either.

The Day Electricity Came on the Back of a Mule

I’m 57 and remember when electricity arrived in the holler. It came from the road a mile away and was strung from the back of a mule slipping and sliding down the almost impassable slope. It dangerously provided one light fixture with no switch in a house without wiring. You unscrewed the bulb to turn it off. My grandparents barely used it. It scared them.

The closest telephone was a mile away at Speed’s General Store. Because of the snow, winter calls were impossible.

There’s more, but you get the essence.

From them, I learned much about the lives of the very poor. It’s easy for people like Gov. Romney to call safety nets with holes so big millions of people fall through them “adequate”. It’s easy for the fast-disappearing middle class to ignore these people…until they’re outsourced and suddenly find the safety net not nearly so safe as they thought.

I’d like to think I would be more compassionate than them, but without my experiences I possibly would have been as blind to the “have nots” as Romney and the Tea Partiers (BTW, I don’t think my grandparents ever drank a cup of tea. They couldn’t afford it).

Just Another Muttonhead With Slicked Back Hair

Had I not had the privilege of seeing the back-breaking labor that stood between my grandparents and, in some cases, death. It would have been possible that I could never have fathomed a life that poor. That deprived. I’d like to think I wouldn’t turn into just another muttonhead with slicked back hair, a limo, and a gold spoon hanging from his mouth. But there for the grace…

I’m willing to vote for anyone in any party if, for once, they’d go live like my grandparents, or in the projects, or under a highway overpass for a week. I’d like to give them a sense of what an “adequate safety net” means.  Just once. Just once.

Gov. Romney, my vote is yours for the taking. I’ll vote for you if you have the courage to live like so many other people in this country for only a week – hell, even a day. After that, I’ll campaign for you if you can just define exactly how it is that our safety nets are adequate.  I’m waiting to give my vote to you right now.

Governor?

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NICOLAUS COPERNICUS – 21st Century man.

I know how Copernicus must have felt.  He’s the fellow who first posited that the Sun, and not Earth, was at the center of the universe. For his trouble he was branded a heretic and ostracized by the Catholic church. It turns out Nicolaus was right and the Pope, not so much. It’s a familiar story. It has legs. It’s still happening at the hands of the far right ignorati.

Burying the Copernican Hatchet

I’m not sure some of America is even in the 21st century. After all, the Catholic church didn’t officially bury the Copernican hatchet until 1999. There’s careful consideration of the facts and then there’s a rip in the Catholic Space/Time Continuum. Or just plain denial like many other things, “Johnny, meet Father Bosco. He’ll be molesting you today.”

Across the nation, the electorate keeps putting people in office that are ignorant at best and willfully brain dead at worst. TN State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R), thinks heterosexual people are nearly immune from HIV and the disease reached humans via a gay airline pilot sexing it up with a monkey.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” Campfield said. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

“Damn you United! Isn’t it enough that you charge us to check baggage?!”

Still, it’s not as if Campfield is alone in his ignorance. No lesser a Far Right-O-Con luminary than Rick Santorum once tried to explain how those filthy homos put us on a sure road to man-on-dog sex (though he denies it today).

As in Copernicus’s day, religion plays a key role in sewing the seeds of dumbassness. The Catholic Church thinks Obama probably wears the mark of the beast and Intelligent Designers think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Noted Family Research Council crackpot, Tony Perkins, thinks homosexual characters in a Star Wars video game will damn all who play it to hell. Just to be clear software maker Bioware says there aren’t any scum sucking homosexual relationships in the game…yet. So Perkins must be launching a peremptory Iran-like strike against the Dark Side.

The far-right’s fear and loathing of the modern world is astounding. (Oklahoma Is Not OK) State Sen. Ralph Shortey is introducing legislation to keep you from getting an aborted fetus to go with that Big Mac.

“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors,” he said. “I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here.”

The Right-O-Cons Seem Sane…to Themselves

Fear is what makes the Right-O-Con’s positions seem so sane…to them. It is the same fear that says a Muslim who has lived next door to you for decades has suddenly become a jihadist because they asked you to celebrate Ramadan with them. It is the same fear that is driving several state and local legislative bodies to enact anti-Sharia laws.

North Carolina state Rep. Larry Pittman,  is borrowing from Sharia because he’s rightfully up in arms over death row inmate Danny Robbie Hembree’s bragging about how easy life is in prison. No doubt the guy is scum and may deserve the death penalty. I don’t know. However, I’m not sure that hanging is any more beneficial than lopping off a hand for stealing.

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in a personal email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

Some of us look at these cases through the lens of Copernicus’s time. We fear what we do not understand and that fear drags us back into the Dark Ages. The human race has been there and done that.  Now it’s time we check this insane time travel and face the 21st Century instead of acting like a village full of superstitious peasants who believe a beast eats the moon each night.

We owe ourselves better than that or it’ll be, “Welcome to 1473.”

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Six years after noted grifter and late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens showed his impeccable technology credentials by likening the Internet to a “series of tubes”, our erstwhile Presidential nominees struggle with the most basic pre-21^st Century gadgets. Gadgets like cameras and audio tape. This is a disturbing trend for a gaggle of walking egos intent on becoming the most audio and video-taped person on the planet.

Them’s the Breaks

No candidate is totally consistent in their speeches, especially when their life is one extended press junket. We expect our candidates to have positions on every imaginable issue, but that’s simply not possible. There are far too many and some are too complex for your average Tea Bagger to hear above the “Death to the Obamunist” chants. Questions come by the bushel and candidates sometimes take an on-the-fly position to fill the dead air with something that turns out is wrong, indefensible, and inconsistent with dozens of other stands they take. When you talk for a living, them’s the breaks.

A candidate will repeatedly be excoriated as a flip-flopper if this happens, and there are only two ways to deal with it. If, like Romney, you change positions like a hummingbird with a nectar jones, you claim you never made the statement or were “misquoted”.  Let’s call this the Romney Method. Or, the Gingrich Method, in which the candidate simply labels the questions “stupid” and refuses to answer when they’ve talked themselves into a corner.

But, both methods have a critical technological fault – video tape.  Let’s call this the Jon Stewart Effect.

Misquotable Quotes

Since candidates are publicly paraded like prize ponies it’s likely that when they change course an inconvenient camera or live mic will catch it.  Suddenly the Jon Stewart Effect kicks in. Jon will make a joke accompanied by some video, and then tell another joke accompanied by video showing a 180 degree spin – a move that even the most talented Olympic figure skaters can’t manage.  It’s hard to defend a flip flop or “misquote” when you’re right there on unedited tape flipping and flopping or proving that your “misquote” was really just a “quote” – one that’s undeniably verbatim.

Newt’s method is no better. He can refuse to answer the question, but chances are he’s already on the record facing in a different ideological direction. Invariably, Jon will pick up on it, or worse, the lamestream media – these days, the right wing media – will hand him his ass on a platter. If video technology doesn’t get him, displaying his monumental hubris will reveal him to be the vicious little prick he is. Not a winning strategy, unless he wants to piss on everyone – including current and ex-wives –  often enough they will do anything possible to ruin his self-declared moment in the sun just for shits and giggles.

Campaigners, here’s some advice: Assume every word, thought, and deed – from pillow talk to Iowa pork belly prices – is on tape somewhere. Assume that any contradictions will show up at the most inopportune time. When it does, be prepared to explain in simple words – and this is important…once and only once – that it was an honest change in view of new facts. After that, you said it, you own it, and you better stick to it. There will be no more opportunities to back out on something you’ve clearly said on the record, because, urm, you are ALWAYS on the record. Handle the impact of audio/visual like a technological problem and no one can contradict you, other than you. You can’t compare and contrast a position if there is nothing to compare it to.

READY! ACTION!

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