“Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president.” – Lonesome Rhodes from the movie A Face In The Crowd (sorry Face)

Click for clip

I COULDN'T SAY IT BETTER

Of course I’m disappointed that Gov. Perky didn’t fall off her high heels during last night’s VP debate and exit the political stage forever, but this chart from Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic (thanks AK) says it all. It’s more concise and to the point than any morning-after comment I can right now conceive, except that I’ve learned that the word “folksy” has been redefined as "nasty, incurious, ignorant hick."

The secret word is Rearguard

GOODBYE AND THANK YOU FOR ALL THE FISH

In a few hours I will watch the VP debate in which Gov. Palin will face Joe Biden on my TV. I can only hope that she will make such a damned fool of herself that she will depart from our consciousness forever, except maybe for a spot on Dancing With The Stars in some distant future, and that the electorate with will not demonstrate a collective idiocy by buying her line of junk and inability to construct a spontaneous sentence.

As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times…
"The McCain campaign has done its bizarre best to shield Ms. Palin from any sustained media examination of her readiness for the highest offices in the land, and no wonder. She has been an embarrassment in interviews.
But the idea that the voters of the United States might install someone in the vice president’s office who is too unprepared or too intellectually insecure to appear on, say, “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation” is mind-boggling.
The alarm bells should be clanging and warning lights flashing. You wouldn’t put an unqualified pilot in the cockpit of a jetliner. The potential for catastrophe is far, far greater with an unqualified president." (Click for more)

Or click here to see CNN news veteran Jack Cafferty lose it over how Palin is “pathetic.”

The secret word is Dismissal

(But here’s an odd thing. Sarah Palin has only a fraction of the Google hits logged by Sarah Connor or Sarah Michelle Gellar.)

IS IT TIME TO START LEARNING WOODY GUTHRIE SONGS?

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

The USA needs a new New Deal to survive the incalculable damage done by eight hideous years of GWB. And it will be socialism that get us through, my friends. Maybe a new socialism, but socialism, any way you slice it.

ALLEY OOP WAS FOR REAL?

Doug the Bass sent over this new revelation about the inept Gov. Perky.

“Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct. Wasilla resident Philip Munger asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs. Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said ‘she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks.’”

WORD UP WALL STREET. GREED WASN’T GOOD AFTER ALL. SEPPUKU IS NOW MANDATORY

That’s right. Jump from the roof you speculating scum, and no golden parachute. The long dive goes with the territory and better people than you have taken it. (Pic supplied by Munz.)

The secret word is Remorse

SOCIALISM! SOCIALISM! TAKE TO THE HILLS!

All the thunderers on the right protest in furious chorus. The US government shall not intervene to save the global economy for that would be the godless abomination of socialism. Oh yes? Oh no! Not for nothing did our fathers and grandfathers chant the mantra “better dead than Red.” The holy tenets of free-market capitalism shall be preserved even though the heavens fall and the whole world fall with them, for thus is the will of the Almighty. What next they cry, universal healthcare?

Michael Moore comes at it from a slightly different angle.

“Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.” Click for more.

Or, by way of a bonus, click here for the entire second Tina Fey-as-Palin clip from last Saturday’s SNL.

IT SLIPPED MY MIND, HONEST

I totally forget that I rant on about The Fugs on Mojo Online. Click here to read.

BEATING BACK THE McPRESIDENCY

After a weekend of despondency over Barack Obama’s debate performance, it maybe starts to emerge, even from polls and other imprecise indicators, that I was wrong and his showing wasn’t as weak as I though it was. Voters did not eat up McCain’s bombastic and mendacious bullshit. I was especially taken with two comments on the Talking Points Memo website that suggest viewer evaluation of the two men went to deeper levels that I ever suspected.

“As a psychotherapist and someone who treats people with anger management problems, we typically try to educate people that anger is often an emotion that masks other emotions. I think it's significant that McCain didn't make much, if any, eye contact because it suggests one of two things to me; he doesn't want to make eye contact because he is prone to losing control of his emotions if he deals directly with the other person, or, his anger masks fear and the eye contact may increase or substantiate the fear.”

Monkeys were also invoked…

“I think people really are missing the point about McCain's failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear--look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior--low ranking monkeys don't look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.”

Yes, the secret word is still Perception

IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

DEMOCRACY OF THE DAMNED

Dear Barack,

Whether you like it or not, and whether I like it or not, you are currently our last best hope to keep assholes like this at bay. I don’t know whether you are playing it too much the gentleman or not. I think we agree that McCain's sneering ill-manners are neither a sign of strength nor even resolve. Beyond that, all I know is, in a whisper over a month, you have to win, preferably in a landslide, or we, and all we hold dear, are wholly toast and, after that, it can only be the barricades, Barcelona, or follow Dr. Thompson.

All the very best,

Mick

(Can the point be made by sequencing images?)

CRYPTIQUE – Patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel, but super-patriotism requires megalomania.

But it’s Sunday, and that means…

THE ADVENTURES OF MARILYN (Part 94)

In which Marilyn is left momentarily without functional shields and blind-minded in the hyperdyne backwash of overdrive. In that exposed instant she is captured by the Satrap of New Pangaea and held in a confinement capsule rigged to resemble the back of a circa mid-1950s Coupe De Ville. Hosed with alpha rays and beta-rhythm barbiturate surrogates, she is presented with the Omega Candle under the false guise that it is her birthday. Marilyn is too hammered to know that, if the Omega Candle is extinguished, one hundred and forty seven thousand congruent realities are extinguished right along with it, plus the lives of incalculable quadrillions of sentient entities. The neuron snappers urge her to blow it out. It is their mission.
“Blow, Marilyn! Blow! “
“Blow, Marilyn! Blow! “
But a sliver of Marilyn’s reality reasserts itself. “This doesn’t quite seem right. There is a disruption in The Force.”
“Blow, Marilyn! Blow! “
“Blow, Marilyn! Blow! “
“I don’t know…”
But, under immense pressure, she puts her lips together anyway…

(Can the French Homosexual and the Dionysian Mob arrive in time to avert disaster?)

THEY DON'T STAGE SHOWS LIKE THIS ANY MORE #6