Who's the Worst of the GOP White House Contenders? Marco Rubio.

By a mile.  Nobody else in the GOP Clown Car even comes close; mostly because the rest of them don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of ever winning a national election.

Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina are batshit crazy.  Donald Trump is too loud and obnoxious.    Ben Carson??? ROTFLMAO!  Ditto for “Jeb!”

Marco Rubio is every bit as Far Right, every bit as corporate-owned-and-operated, as the rest of the GOP Clown Car, but without the foaming-at-the-mouth bug-eyed craziness that would scare off Middle America.  Marco Rubio COULD get elected if he wins the nomination.  And that is just plain fuckin' scary.

Underneath that smiling personable Ricky Martin demeanor, Rubio is just another corporate prostitute who's being paid to pick up where George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan left off.  Here's Matt Taibbi's impression of Marco Rubio in a Rolling Stone article:

“He is short but prickishly good-looking, all hair and teeth and self-confidence. He's the kind of guy that no group of men wants to go to a bar with, both because he spoils the odds and because he seems like kind of an asshole generally...There are young women in the crowd looking up at him adoringly, like a Beattle... He's so slick, he could probably sell a handful of cars at every speech...He checks all the boxes of what the Beltway kingmakers look for in a political marketing phenomenon: young, ethnic, good-looking, capable of working a room like a pro and able to lean hard on an inspirational bio while eschewing policy specifics...Rubio sells a kind of strident, bright-eyed dickishness that in any other year would seem tailor-made for roping in conservatives.”

Scared yet?  Here are some of the “policy specifics” that Marco Rubio wants to eschew — at least until AFTER he wins the White House:

If you like Private Prisons — aka the Prison Industrial Complex, For-Profit Prisons, the various Kids-For-Cash scandals (Google it) — You'll love Marco Rubio.

And don't you just hate those FCC commies with their nanny state Net Neutrality?  Wouldn't you love to crack down down on those municipal governments who are providing low-cost high-speed Broadband access?  So would Marco Rubio.

And needless to say, Marco Rubio wants to return control of banking/financial regulations to the Wall Street thugs who have purchased him.

Be Very Afraid.

Matt Taibbi's Rhetorical Question about the Tea Party

Meme GOP

Here's the entire quote from the Meme GOP post:

“So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudo-militia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.” 

And check out the Rolling Stone article from which these quotes were taken:   The Truth About the Tea Party by Matt Taibbi.

You won't be surprised, but you'll be more furious and disgusted than ever.

Separated at Birth: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Bob Dylan

Is it just me, or does the picture of Bob Dylan on the current Rolling Stone cover (RS 1191) look an awful lot like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

When I picked up the newest Rolling Stone a few days ago, I was “WTF???  They’re putting the Boston Bomber on the cover again???  Oh, it’s Bob Dylan.”

It’s one thing to see a picture by itself and think “this looks a lot like ____________.”  But when you place the two Rolling Stone issues (RS 1188 and RS 1191) side by side on the table, there’s still a bizarre resemblance between the two cover pictures, IMHO.

It’s an early photo of Bob Dylan.  The cover story (which I haven’t read yet) is titled “Dylan:  The Lost Years.”

Five Traits Shared by Every Teabagger

This is taken from Matt Taibbi’s article, “Tea and Crackers: How Corporate Interests and Republican Insiders Built the Tea Party Monster” in the current Rolling Stone.

It’s an excellent article. (The same issue of RS also has an interview with Obama.) If you’ve been following the news closely, the teabagger article probably won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. Hopefully this article will reach the jillions of Rolling Stone readers who don’t surf leftwing websites.

Taibbi says:

“So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street?” And:

“A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.”

My favorite part is the author’s personal observations about teabaggers, based on conversations and interviews during the past year. Most of them share these five traits:

I. You probably think most teabaggers were happily oblivious during the GW Bush years, and they suddenly developed a pulse when that Kenyan Muslim hijacked the White House. Nope. You’re Wrong! Each and every teabagger has been out there for the past ten years, protesting against Big Government and High Taxes. Funny how we didn’t start seeing them until a year and a half ago, but by golly, they’ve been out there all along, yessireebob!

II. They all know the Constitution inside and out, and each one of them thinks they’re the only person in America with this unique qualification.

III. They all play the “Race Card” card. They insist that poor homeowners (mostly minorities) caused the trillion-dollar meltdown (enabled by that socialist Community Reinvestment Act of the late ‘70s); they’re obsessed with “news” stories about ACORN and the New Black Panthers; and they claim Obama is a Muslim who was born in Africa. And then they’re just shocked — shocked! — that people accuse them of being racists.

IV. Some of their best friends are black.

V. They think anyone who disagrees with them is an America-hating leftist. This attitude is nurtured by their mentor, Dick Armey, who regularly tells his inbreds that their opponents are “people who do not cherish America the way we do.”

If you’ve done much arguing with teabaggers — in person or online — you’re probably familiar with these Big Five talking points; especially the first one.

Pay No Attention to the Mouthbreathing Rightwad Behind the Curtain

If you read “liberal” news sites, you’ve already known for the past year about the sickfuck twisted devious methods of Republican strategists. But then, if you go to those sites, you’re probably a liberal anyway — aka “preaching to the choir.”

But now — finally! — the mainstream media is actually waking up. For this brief moment, the general public is finding out what the rest of us have known all along.

You already knew that Republicans eat their young. The GOP is nothing but a gang of slippery lowlifes who will do anything — whatever it takes! — to keep their corporate masters propped up. And now John Q. Public knows it too.

Even with the public’s notoriously short attention span — Hey! Quit Looking Around! — this might be a case of not being able to put the toothpaste back into the tube (as one of the Watergate conspirators put it).

After all, when you find out how a magician does his tricks, you’re no longer gonna go “Wow! He pulled a rabbit out of his hat!” Hopefully some of the independent/swing voters will consider the source when they hear the next outburst of “Socialism!” “Government Takeover!” “Muslim!” “Born in Kenya!” And just maybe, some of the top GOP donors will be a little less “giving” after seeing themselves described as “ego-driven” and “easily pacified with tchochkes.”

Rolling Stone is another vehicle for reaching millions of people who probably don’t read DailyKos, AlterNet, Think Progress, etc. Matt Taibbi’s articles and exposés have been a Godsend. And the newest Rolling Stone has The GOP’s Dirty War by Tim Dickinson. Come on people, get informed.

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And now, calling all elderly Dinosaurs: Ron Banks, lead singer of the Dramatics, died of a heart attack yesterday. The only song I remember from them was “What You See Is What You Get.” That song just killed. It was one of the few radio hits that I never ever got tired of, no matter how many times it got played.

R.I.P.

Republican “Grassroots” “Populist” Anger

Believe it or not, the public’s unarticulated unfocused fury is actually being harnessed by Republicans. Republicans have spent eight years (or is that 28 years?) creating most of the problems that the public is angry and frustrated about. And now Republican leaders are actually channeling and using this mass fury for their own purposes. Go figure.

Maybe they’ve been inspired by the occasional news story about a firefighter who sets a fire and then charges in and rescues everybody so he can be a hero.

These two articles (here and here) both describe the Republicans’ recent success at manipulating a scared, confused and gullible public. It doesn’t seem to matter that Republicans don’t have any solutions of their own; not a single specific idea. Apparently it’s enough to just keep yelling “Obama Socialist Nazi Communist Fascist,” “government takeover of Your health care!” and “Death Panels!” and millions of gullible assholes will go “DUUUHHH, yeah that’s right.”

Personally I think it’s too early to make any predictions about the 2010 election. Until a few weeks ago, the “experts” were saying the Republican Party was shattered and they’d stay in the minority for a looong time. Now suddenly it’s “Obama is plummeting in the polls, Democrats will stay home and get stoned on Election Day since it isn’t a presidential election year, and Republicans will retake the House.”

One day at a time…

But it really is infuriating that the Democrats are just paralyzed by all this chaos and public anger, and the Republicans can just step in and start soothing and manipulating the masses. Sort of like an animal trainer who can calm a vicious snarling Rottweiler and then train him.

The newest issue of Rolling Stone has an article about this. The article isn’t available online. The website shows it on the table of contents — “The GOP’s Lie Machine” by Tim Dickinson.

If you’ve been reading liberal blogs and “alternate” news sites (Think Progress, Raw Story, AlterNet, etc.), this article won’t tell anything you don’t already know. But it’s encouraging to see a mainstream magazine like Rolling Stone publicizing this, since most of the mainstream “media” isn’t touching these issues.

The most revealing thing in the article is a quote from Dick Armey (former House Majority Leader; founder of FreedomWorks). Armey was asked why there wasn’t any of this populist fury over high taxes and “big government” when Bush was driving us trillions of dollars into debt. His response:

“We used to use the old saying in the West, that you got outta town just one step ahead of the hangman. That’s pretty much what happened with Bush. And poor old President Obama walked into town, y’know, just at high noon.”

Straight from the horse’s (ass’s) mouth.