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Notes from a Southern Dissident

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9th May 2004

1:50am: Getting behind Young Republicans in a Walmart checkout
I know I shouldn't have, but there are times when you really really need cat litter, ok? And so I found myself at the SuperWalmart on Siegen around midnight, with a 20-pound bag of Purina Cat Chow in one hand and a jug of litter in the other. Only two check out lanes were open.

The closest one was an express lane, limited to ten-items. But in front of me was this couple who seemed to be buying the inventory to open up ANOTHER Walmart. It wasn't yet their turn in line. Their basket teemed with steaks, hams, items of clothing, cans of vegetables, jugs of milk, a garden hose, you name it. The cashier noticed them and told them this was a ten-items express lane. They bickered with her. They had a point. The other lanes open were express, too.

I admit I could have gone to one of the other lanes, each located probably equidistantly from where I stood. But I had to carry out a thought experiment. Would this evidently well-off, whitebread couple in their late twenties let me ahead of them? I cleared my throat. I walked around a little. I drifted by their peripheral vision, my two items very conspicuous much like my lack of a buggy or basket. Nothing.

They didn't even look at me.

And they had their thousand items scanned, paid their bill with a fiercely-determined obliviousness of my existence. I read about Mary Kate Olson's physique as they got their Walmart crap bagged. She MAY have anorexia.

I ALMOST said to the guy before he left, "I bet your a BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG Sean Hannity fan, aren't ya?" But I'm no bully.

7th May 2004

8:53pm: It is soooooooooo over.
It's a measure of how truly morally bankrupt our mainstream media has become that the worst of the news of the day is in paragraph SIX of this piece. That's right. Paragraph SIX.

Apparently MSNBC's reporter at the scene thought the troubles of the very very rich Donald Rumsfeld is the big story here.

And get a load of the nausea-inducing Joe Scarborough link.

There continue to be no words for this.
7:26pm: From the "Did I hear this right?" file
I turned on The O'Reilly Factor just now just to hear how the crazies are rationalizing the torture of Iraqis. Linda Chavez, who was almost Bush's labor secretary, is saying the introduction of women into the military is the cause of these incidents. If the women weren't in the military, increasing the "sexual tension," you wouldn't have had fellahs wanting to torture Iraqis in prison by forcing them to fellate each other. You wouldn't have had a 21-year-old yokel girl pointing at Iraqi packages in the Washington Post.

How do people get to be Republicans and how do they stay that way?

I can't imagine thinking the way they have to think or saying the things they think they have to say.
Current Mood: cynical
4:38pm: With regard to the charges of torture, denatured so that they're mere "prisoner abuse" charges in our adversarial media:

I think this gives up the ship for us regarding the invasion of Iraq. The only rationale that in the minds of most Americans made up for the collossal NO WMDs mistake was the idea that we "came as liberators." No. We came as voyeuristic sadists.

You've seen the pictures. Maybe you think I'm overstating it so far. Piles of Iraqi men in awkward positions naked? Some Gomer girl pointing with ciggy in mouth? Just some harmless fun?

I'm hoping like hell that the best journalist in America is going to be proven wrong. I hope he'll end up so embarrassed that his forty-year career will be but a lead-up to this one monumental error that casts discredit on it all. But unfortunately, this isn't likely. Seymour Hersh is usually right:

"First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.

There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners."

So the indications are that the photos we've seen were only from a batch the investigators thought least likely to provoke wildfire reactions. It's going to get this bad . Hell, it already has.

Can you imagine how Americans would react if reports of these kinds of activities were to emerge from our own juvenile prisons for women? Can you imagine the violence? It would be organized. There would be angry groups of men lying in wait.

And we think we've had it bad in Iraq so far?

We're going to have to leave. Sooner, not later.

18th April 2004

9:34pm: Lame-brained idea for a million-dollar business number 4,567
Many varieties of fresh salads delivered right to your door for a reasonable price. Like pizza, but good for you!
6:25pm: Worse than anything in Woodward's book
More proof didn't launch the invasion of Iraq to make us safer.

14th April 2004

1:48pm: While on my way home from a Pointe Coupee Police Jury meeting I had covered, I heard the latter half of Bush's press conference. In any other country, at any other time it would have been a disaster, but in this era when no one who's reached a sufficiently important office is allowed to be held responsible for what he/she says or does or doesn't do, it was a home run.

At one point, I was kind of panicked as a guy rooting for Kerry. Bush was asked what he specifically DID after he read that August 6th memo, the PDB that has caused so much commotion this week. I thought to myself, "If he can say he really DID something after seeing that, Kerry's got one less issue, or at least his surrogates do."

I needn't have bothered. All W did was talk about how the memo was mostly history, how comforted he was to learn 70 FBI investigations on Al-Qaeda were ongoing and how it was very important that he had been meeting with the CIA director every day, much unlike his predecessor.

Eh . . . you missed something there, dunderhead.

But of course, since it's the White House and since he's the president of the US not the prime minister of England, no followups are allowed. They are frowned upon. Next question.

Yep . . . that's our Bush.

12th April 2004

7:27pm: Air America show archives (unauthorized).

Just associate em with your winamp player.

10th April 2004

1:51am: Meanwhile in Falluja, we continue to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Do not click on the link if you're faint of heart.
1:49am: On the Condi appearance
I guess now we know why the Bushies fought having her testify for so long . . .

Condi does deserve some credit. She could have just lied and lied and lied and lied. Instead she just lied. Is it respectful to refer to her practiced facial expression during the hearing as "cheeseating?" Probably not.

My own reaction? I watched with a kind of wistfulness. IF ONLY I could have gotten away with doing a lazy half-assed job just by sitting there and telling my boss "well, no one ever came to me with that." The only way you can keep a job in America, being that passive and that useless and SAY SO repeatedly is if you're on the very top levels, if you're a CEO or a National Security Advisor. If you try to explain your failures as a pizza delivery driver that way . . . you're going to be an ex-pizza driver in under five minutes.

Speaking of that job . . . I'm probably bound for it soon. The student loan money has run out. The summer teaching job doesn't kick in till June. The tax refund check won't arrive (says the IRS website) till early June at the earliest . . . so I'm definitely sweating here. I'm shedding resumes like dandruff. Don't stand too close . . . you'll get paper cut in several places.

So far I'm sending them to sales jobs and clerical jobs. I'm signing up with every temp agency I can think of. I'm also planning to write to law firms and send out as many inquiries as my scant postage budget will allow.

I've also put nearly every thing valuable I own for sale on ebay or half.com. I'm running out quickly.

This time next week I'm liable to be working in a bait shop.

31st March 2004

1:25pm: Airamerica, the new liberal talk show network is on.

You can hear it by going to the link and clicking on the bottom of the page.
12:37am: The White House has pulled another of its thousands of John Kerry flip flops and now we're going to see Condi Rice testify. While I'm going to relish seeing that rather smug, rather insouciant NSA having to answer questions she won't be able to finesse as easily as those of Bob Schieffer, I look forward to possibly having the answers to the following questions, which to date we've not had answers to. She may be the only official in a position to provide such answers--if she cares to.

Why was Richard Clarke's plan, which he presented to you when you took office, which conceivably might have made things hard for bin Laden and the rest of his demons, buried under months and months of meetings with deputies?

Why say to America in August of 02 that no one could have foretold the use of airplanes as missiles when measures were taken when Bush went to the Genoa summit that were meant to prevent planes from being used as missiles ON HIM?

Why weren't our air defenses immediately notified when it became clear to air traffic controllers that the first plane's transponder had been shut off?

Why was Bush sitting there in that classroom for twenty minutes reading The Hungry Caterpillar to a classroom full of children right after being told of the second plane hitting the second tower?

29th March 2004

9:55pm: We truly are living in a different era folks. According to MSNBC (the great Josh Marshall found this buried in one of their stories), the White House is using the CIA to go through Richard Clarke's secret testimony to see what can and can't be released. You can be sure that if it HELPS Bush, it'll be released, and if it doesn't, it'll remain classified.

Didn't Nixon get impeached for just ASKING the CIA to cover something up? And here in 2004 we've got Bush actually successfully USING the CIA to smear somebody.

We really live in a different political era, folks. I wish I could say it was just because the Congress is Republican, but then how do you explain the media's lassitude in pointing this stuff out?

Yep, these days are different.

28th March 2004

4:34am: Noam Chomsky is now blogging, although he doesnt seem to know how to link to much.

It should be fun to watch that mind respond to the day's news.
1:38am: Welcome to Police State Louisiana, folks. And can you imagine the Rehnquist-Scalia Supreme Court reversing this? Not in this lifetime, mon chere!

Now just what is a "brief" warrantless search of your home? Ten minutes, half an hour, three weeks?

And I'm supposed to take the word of a New Orleans cop that the new freedoms will not be abused?

That's like trusting the Bush administration to investigate itself.

27th March 2004

1:26am: How to think of the Clarke case
I think I can boil down whether or not Clarke's testimony should be taken seriously if you're wavering on it by isolating just one part of his testimony this past Wednesday. Here it is:

Condi Rice came back from that meeting [with Bush], called me, and relayed what the president had requested. And I said, Well, you know, we've had this strategy ready since before you were inaugurated. I showed it you. You have the paperwork. We can have a meeting on the strategy any time you want.

She said she would look into it. Her looking into it and the president asking for it did not change the pace at which it was considered. And as far as I know, the president never asked again; at least I was never informed that he asked again. I do know he was thereafter continually informed about the threat by George Tenet.


Has Condi Rice refuted that this occurred? No. All she's done is hurl accusations based on his PR work done for Bush in August of 2002.

If Condi and the Bushies would actually tell us that Bush's request to "stop swatting flies" actually sped up any of the anti-terror work and then SHOW us the proof that this was the case, then we'd be able to dismiss Clarke entirely. But so far they haven't taken the challenge at all. All we get from them are memos he wrote (as part of the job of any presidential aide) praising Bush.

What we're seeing now is a clinic on the use of the ad hominem and the red herring argument. And there's no sign we'll be favored with enough information to determine what really happened till the commission report comes out (this coming summer).

It should be interesting reading.

20th March 2004

7:49pm: I seem to have been awarded three courses at River Parishes Community College that start in early June. They are eight-week courses. Two are early morning and one starts around six pm, so there'll be two round trips from Baton Rouge to Sorrento every business day for two months. I won't have an office, so there'll be no place to hang out six hours. Guess I'll just go home.

A hilarious thing happened the other night on one of my favorite radio shows, Coast to Coast AM with George Noory: he got fed up with two guests and threw them off the show permanantly. It wasn't because they were frauds. Frauds MAKE the show, after all. It was because one of them wouldn't volunteer what he claims Sister Lucia (of Fatima prophecy fame) told him in their five-minute talk.

It's fine on Coast to Coast to peddle malarky. Just fill in the TIME, dammit.

12th March 2004

4:51pm: I really don't know what to make of the fact that at the bottom of the last page of the book excerpt Salon.com is running, the excerpt that gives us the story on how members the bin Laden family was able to fly out of America uninterrogated shortly after Sept 11, we see advertisements. What are they for? Web pages that help you get jobs on airplanes, as flight attendants, pilots.

Like what you heard about our aviation system's role in keeping the investigation of 9/11 off track? Then make your career with us!

10th March 2004

12:07am: Just came back from seeing a nearly two-hour talk by Al Franken at LSU's Pete Maravich Assembly Center, of all places. Nearly half the arena was full. There were no hecklers that I heard, despite the forebodings I felt that there would be some. Neither did I see any picket signs. I guess ex-Republican candidate for state senator and current tabloid editor Wayne T. Lewis got neither of his wishes.

Franken said his radio show will be starting March 31st. You can see on the very very meticulous and current fan website devoted to him that he is also scheduled to debate the conservative clown-woman Ann Coulter in Harford, Connecticut May 14. Please, CSpan, please cover that. For humanity's sake!

If you feel as I do, that CSpan should televise this certain horsewhipping (and my word choice is no reflection on either participant's facial features, ok?), write to the folks at CSpan to request it.

I taped the Franken talk and will be immortalizing it on mp3 to get out to friends who missed his appearance.

7th March 2004

5:09pm: The key questions in the 04 presidential race
Will Kerry spend enough money to compete with Bush on the airwaves?

I think Kerry can raise about $125 million at the MOST for his campaign. About $50 million will be at the disposal of sympathetic interest groups who back him. But that $50 million will be more than matched by Republican groups. If Kerry can tap into the Heinz fortune, he may be able to compete on the airwaves, but if not . . . you can bet the Bushies will dominate the air campaign.

Does Kerry pick a VP who can bring in a large state Kerry wouldn't otherwise win?

I think in a year with so few states in play, and with Bush unlikely to drop Cheney, you've got to take what edge you can. I thought one of the many missed opportunitues for Gore to have helped himself out the last go-round was to have chosen a popular Southerner. Gore would have won Connecticut regardless of picking Leiberman, and Leiberman really brought nothing in the way of dynamism to the campaign. Kerry's a more aggressive campaigner and shouldn't make the same mistake.

How will Kerry respond to the repeated charges that he flip-flops?

Many ways to go on this. I'm inclined to respond with a list of issues Bush himself has flipflopped on, from the patient's bill of rights in Texas when he was governor to his promise in the debates not to nation-build to his waffling on Homeland Security to the threat of WMDs changing to the mere possibility of WMD related program activities to his job forecasts to . . . whew! You get the picture.

But Bush also runs into trouble frequently because of the ways he WON'T flip-flop. The question for me on this isn't so much IF you do, but WHY you do. So if the retort can be that Bush flip-flops when he shouldn't and stays the course when he should change . . . maybe you've got something ad worthy. His overall decision-making becomes the problem.

The one thing you DON'T do is let it go on and on without explaining some of the reasons you DID change your mind, or why, in fact, you WEREN'T really flip-flopping. So Kerry has to get right on this pretty quickly.

Does Kerry attack Bush on his immediate response to 9/11?

I am not among those who think Kerry should just concede Bush did a good job in the days immediately after 9/11. I think there were some real stumbles there, starting with the still-unexplained delay in getting jets scrambled to chase the hijacked planes and with Bush's incredible decision to continue reading The Hungry Caterpillar to schoolchildren in Florida after being told about the second plane-strike.

There's a way to do this, of course. You'd nip around the edges at first. You'd have your democratic surrogates talk it up on a few shows to see how it goes. You'd suggest to one of the interest groups that it run a commercial asking why Bush sat there so long and why no action was taken by NORAD till it was way too late. You wouldn't have Kerry bring it up till just before the debates, and even then you'd phrase the issue in the form of questions rather than accusations.

Do the job numbers rebound?

While it's unlikely they rebound in enough numbers to keep Bush from becoming the first president since Hoover to preside over a net jobs loss, the jobs will most likely come back. Surely, with the productivity numbers and the profit numbers rising SOMEONE's going to start hiring, right? In this case, Kerry has to accept Bush will get some credit. But will the jobs be good ones? Will wages rise? Will these stunningly high gas prices spur rises in inflation?

Even if a couple hundred thousand jobs come down the line, there will still be many questions regarding the Bushies' management of the economy. Wages and benefits would be the natural line of attack in that case, but a good bit of hammering on the deficit would also be called for.

The case could also be made that the Bush tax-cuts to the wealthy made it more likely that any recovery would be enjoyed by the rich rather than by the middle classes who were told for so many months they'd just have to wait.

Do we start to see any order in Iraq?

Bush's end-of-July deadline for the turning over of power doesn't necessarily have to be met. But if by October there are still many bombings per week and if--nightmare of nightmares--one of the three major religious/ethnic groupings in Iraq stages some sort of walk-out or mounts some kind of separatist movement, the blame falls on Bush. More Americans would just conclude we shouldn't have taken the country over to begin with. Not good for Bush. And turmoil of the kind I sketch here would not be good for the planet, much less the War on Terror.

These are the questions I'll be watching play out as the months go on. Feel free to add any of your own in the comments.

4th March 2004

9:47pm: Dick Morris is counselling Bush to run in this election as he ran the 02 Congressional elections: scare us.

Second, while his anti-Kerry ads are running, the president himself needs to make Americans understand that the war on terror is still atop our national agenda. He needs to elevate the sense of threat so that his advantage as a war president begins to count.
7:54pm: I really do sense a masculine-feminine dynamic to politics in the South among white males. Yesterday I talked to a construction worker who said he was pro-Bush. He explained that Bush "HAD to do what he did," and that no matter what he did "there'd be people bitchin' about it." Later he talked about his nephew who has been in Iraq since the war started. He was supposed to come home this past October.

"It's shameful. It's cruel the way the military is doing them over there!" he exclaimed.

Because of the work I was doing I felt forbidden to ask him the obvious question, doesn't Bush have a little something to do with the way the military treats its privates and sergeants and corporals?

For this guy, voting for a Democrat just doesn't register as a possibility. It would be tantamount to wearing a dress, to joining those who "bitch and moan," to joining the Yankee army.

This isn't to say you don't TRY to peel off some Southern states for November. You should just realize that a lot of working class white males are just LOST, and it's better to spend your energy elsewhere.

29th February 2004

10:13pm: Another great great Rightwing blog, this from a young 'un at the University of Indiana. Here's a taste:

That night I went Miss Saigon with a girl I met in my religions class. I was always kind of curious about the plays that go on in the theater. And I could not just go by my self or with my fraternity brothers because that would make me a fagit. The only way straight guys should ever go into a musical theater is with a girl. Or else he does not like girls.

Credit to the incomparable patriotboy for finding it and to the indispensableatrios for finding patriotboy finding it.

On a day when we may have engineered, or at least assisted, a coup in Haiti, whisking their elected president out of the country and onto one of our aircraft carriers, what is the headline on CNN.com?

Zellweger, Robbins take home Oscars

Those Haitians can wait, right? Screw them. Let's hear if Return of the King gets upset!

27th February 2004

3:49pm: I believe I may have found the greatest Rightwing blog in the history of blogdom.

Check out http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/

A quick extract:
It's good to see that HBO's Sex in the City is finally gone. That show has done more damage to the American family than Janet Jackson, The Simpsons, and Tinky Winky combined. It wasn't just the nudity and the graphic language that made it so dangerous, it was the message it sent to our nation's women, "sex is enjoyable."

I'm a very experienced guy. I've been married for many years, and I exercised my marital rights on a regular basis until my little soldier transferred to a base in a psychological Alabama. Although I'm not proud of it, I also engaged in pre-marital relations with a couple of young ladies during the wild days of my youth. None of these women enjoyed sex. In fact, they all hated it. Sometimes just the thought of having sex with me would cause them to vomit. That's the way God created them. That's why He had to command them to go forth and multiply. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it.

The feminists know this. They created Sex in the City to exploit it in their ongoing war against masculinity. Their aim was to undermine our authority as husbands by telling our wives that it was our fault they didn't enjoy sex.

24th February 2004

10:40pm: If the Dems play it right, Bush has handed them an issue with his backing of an anti-gay-marriage amendment. He can easily be painted as doing the bidding of the Religious Right yet again, with this being the mere topper. Americans do find extremism distasteful (though it isn't always) and any move Bush makes to appeal to the Fred Phelpses and the Jack Chicks among us ought to be recognized for the electoral poison it is.

Care has to be taken to keep any use of Bush's anti-gay move from seeming like support of gay marriage, however. It's an unfortunate truth that most of America remains pretty retrograde in their opposition to it. But defacing the Constitution with a Jerry Falwell-rigged amendment is not all that attractive to most of us. Something about allowing James Dobson a billboard on the Consitution will not sit well with most Americans.

And as for Bush's petulant whining about "activist judges" . . . anybody remember Bush v. Gore?
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