The South Carolina food fight – a longstanding electoral tradition – is in full fury, the GOP candidates fighting like dogs, only this time with even bigger dogs – the Super PACs – duking it out in the same ring. This is typically when the worst tendencies come to the fore in the Republican party, and this year should be even uglier than the last two presidential cycles.
In any case, let’s look at some of what’s being said, shall we?
Gingrich in the last debate: “To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”
Hah! You’ve got to love this guy, don’t you? He finds it “appalling” that the media would stoop so low as to open a debate with questions of infidelity. Yes, this is the same Newt Gingrich that was Speaker during much of the Clinton administration – the same Newt who made that president’s extramarital dalliances a national issue, to the point of the first impeachment trial in the Senate since Reconstruction. Newt 
Gingrich, who led the nation to a constitutional crisis over a presidential blow job, is now appalled that his pseudo-romantic foibles are considered a matter of national concern. Welcome to the world you helped invent, big guy.
Romney in the last debate: “I’m someone who believes in free enterprise. I think Adam Smith was right. And I’m going to stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign.”
Who can doubt that Romney stands for free enterprise? It’s the system that made him a multi-millionaire, with so much cash he needs to ship a fair amount of it to the Cayman Islands for safe (i.e. tax-free) keeping. The thing is, like so many modern-day “capitalists”, he has a very narrow understanding of Adam Smith – the man who had little sympathy for the “joint stock companies” of his day and who decried the “vile maxim of the rulers of mankind – all for me and nothing for anybody else.” Smith was a product of the Enlightenment, which of course puts him in a separate category altogether from these robber barons and bigots, who make me think of another more recent philosopher, John Dewey, who described politics as “the shadow cast upon society by big business.” True that.
Rick Perry: “I quit”
Domage. I, for one, will miss Cousin Rick, if only for all those songs he did for us.
luv u,
jp
Why am I amused by this? Hey… when you call a dump like this “home”, you must find amusement wherever it may be lurking. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are always looking for new distractions. Is that because Big Green is not what you would call a “performing” band? Perhaps, perhaps. Fewer reasons to venture out of the mill, particularly now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes our grocery runs for us. “You trust him with money?” I imagine you’re thinking right now. My imaginary answer would be, “No; we program him to work as a day laborer before he goes to the store. That’s how we roll.”
So hell, I’m building a new Big Green web site. It will be big… and green. Perhaps shiny, perhaps not. I’m not super crazy about shiny, to tell the honest truth – it makes things look too much like what’s looking at them. Anyway, that’s what all the hammering is about – that’s the sound of Web development up here in the sticks. That’s what it sounds like when someone is building a Web site you can really sink your teeth into. A site that is chewy, not cakey… just the way you like it.
This, my friends, is the power of the fossil-fuel industry. Through their marketing and their political surrogates, they have taken a nation on the brink of consensus regarding climate change back in 2007 and turned it 180 degrees into deep denial. The great recession has helped in this regard, of course – jobs versus environment has always been an effective diversion. It has particular resonance now that the Democrats are effectively missing in action on this issue, running scared on the threat of nastiness from the other side. Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland election year.
Ensconced once again within the crumbling walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, I can report that we of Big Green are back to doing what we do best: inventing snacks out of items collected from the goodwill box. If it weren’t for all this music stuff we might be good at it by now. Oh, the burden of servings such a demanding muse! Nothing is good enough, nothing! We work our fingers to the bone – nay, to the marrow – hammering out songs in the clammy basement of this condemned factory, then tossing them skyward… only to see them knocked back in anger. “Send me hooks!” demands the disembodied voice. “We are not amused!”
Lincoln! It shouldn’t happen to our quality Lincoln!
American military might. They mark the beginning of the recession in the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. They see the national debt as the cause of unemployment. On their planet, the only problem with our electoral system is fraudulent voting – i.e. people (perhaps “illegal” immigrants) breaking federal law to usurp a franchise very few Americans are inclined to exercise legitimately. All domestically produced fossil fuel, in their tiny minds, is somehow reserved for use by Americans alone, not simply dumped into the global market and snapped up by whoever pays for it (i.e. how it actually works).