Summer Song

 Broke my long hiatus from punditry today with an article on the city’s faux-budget. Read it, hot from the pages from CityBeat Analog, here. Haven’t written since my last, aptly named entry, “Last Hurrah” back in April. Don’t really plan to write any more until the end of August. I’m not teaching this summer, for the first time in around 20 years, so I’m taking the summer off from my usual concerns–teaching, administrating, teaching, punditrying and, of course, teaching–to pursue other pursuits (beach, patio, other writing projects, beach, patio and, above all, five o’clock proseco time in the gazebo. I’m not kidding. We have a freakin’ gazebo and, every summer day at 5, adjourn there for a glass of cold proseco. It’s a good life.)

In any event, what is there to say right now that’s worth saying? At the local level things in June, 2009 are not really all that different than in June, 2000 or 2001. The city continues to muddle along with the usual mediocre municipal mundanity: precarious finances, feckless leadership and a gentle diminishment of America’s finest city to just another over-extended, under-repaired American town. Frye will be off the council soon, Jerry will be off to gentlemanly retirement and DeMaio will be Mayor—so it has been written, it seems, so it will be done. The Tribe of Five Old White People will continue to dominate the County. The Airport Authority will continue to plan billions of dollars in new projects that will never be spent for an airport that will never be adequate or replaced. The Chargers will continue to lobby for their new stadium which will inevitably be built with public monies (my suggestion, alas, that they build it beneath a three trillion dollar convention center expansion—which, I think, around the amount the convention center really dreams of spending) whether it takes another year or ten. Only the decline of the UT and the tantalizing possibility that the new owners might realize that if Kittle and Kompany continue to dictate editorial viewpoint the paper’s circulation will continue to shrink to the sixty-five and older north of Mira Mesa Boulevard crowd offers some hope for a break in the local monotony. Who knows – by fall the UT may have a new crowd (albeit probably a bunch of twenty-somethings paid minimum wage) flogging the pagewaves. Couldn’t hurt.

Of course, things have changed dramatically in Sacramento. Six years ago we had an unpopular second-term governor disowned even by his own party presiding over massive state deficits, declining services, increasing taxes, unrestrained partisan warfare with absolutely no realistic solutions being offered by the legislative leadership lugs. Oh, how times have changed. (Dramatic pause for sarcastic effect.)

And, at the national level, we have our Obama moment, Act One. Tobacco has been regulated. Some form of healthcare reform is on the way. The economy is no longer sinking. Yay. Except that the tobacco reform is about two generations too late to really matter, the healthcare reform is going to be delightfully watered down and any leveling off of economy we’re currently seeing is actually a consequence of actions taken last fall before Obama came into office. It takes around six months or more for policy decisions in DC to trickle into the real economy—the Obama stimulus won’t really begin to be felt until late summer and, by then, will be revealed, I fear, to be too little. Unemployment continues to rise – my bet is it eventually hits 11%-12%. Foreclosures continue to mount and the other shoe of the real estate debacle—the commercial side of the house—is caving. (Count empty storefronts and commercial “For Rent” signs next time you’re out.) At some point Obama’s love affair with Wall Street and Wall Street types has got to end and more aggressive Keynesian tactics aimed at homeowners and consumers have got kick in. According to retail experts, it’s going to take ten years, at this point, to get back to consumer spending levels in 2007. If everything starts turning around now. Obama keeps going the path he’s going and he runs the risk of becoming the American Kiichi Miiyazawa, (the Japanese Prime Minister who helped keep Japan from falling into depression back in 1990-1991 but, instead, ushered in a decade plus of stagnation.) The world can—and did—survive a stagnant Japan. It won’t survive, with any stability, a stagnant United States. Meanwhile national discourse has degenerated to a nasty level that simultaneously makes dock workers blush and insults the intelligence of second graders. I’m taking the summer off from Fox, MSBNC and the entire AM dial. I haven’t heard one original thing said (Obama is a radical, communist-socialist-muslim-American-hater and Republicans are Rush Limbaugh) in months by any of my brethren (albeit it far more lucratively compensated kin) in punditry. My bet is, come September 1, I turn on Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews after a two-month hiatus and I won’t have missed a beat. Maybe, by end of summer, democracy will have come to Iran. (Which I doubt. Erstwhile president Ahmadinukejihad will emerge from this ultimately stronger, probably having co-opted the authority of the religious clerics and, thereby, regressing Iran back to a standard authoritarian model.) If democracy does triumph, however, people are going to (oh, it gives me gout right down to my little toe to write this) reassess the Bush-Cheney theory of viral democracy. Look at Lebanon. But that’s a debate for another month.

In short, I go into the summer feeling crotchety and persnickety about all things political. By summers end, though, batteries recharged, feelings reinvigorated, I’ll be back to pound the punditry pages. Hopefully in a reformatted format—one of my summer projects is to try and upgrade and integrate this blog into more comprehensive website that can be useful to both my students and you, my faithful reader. (If there are any of you left – alas, even poor Mlaiuppa has bailed on me given my niggardly natterings. ) As such, a bid you summer time adieu. Look for me when the dog days are over, if you care to.

Last Hurrah

 

I spent spring break completing revisions to the chapter on George W. Bush in the presidential anthology Public Pillars/Private Lives.

Thee volume, attempts to give a balanced history and assessment of modern presidents since FDR.  A new edition, including the assessment of the second Bush term plus a chapter on the 2008 election comes out this spring.   Here’s a taste:

From the Conclusion of the chapter on George W. Bush:

Bush’s legacy will be judged ultimately by two things. First, would his aggressive, unilateral foreign policy–the boldest assertion of American power since Reagan, certainly, and perhaps even Teddy Roosevelt a century before–be judged to have ultimately improved America’s global  power, position and security?  Or would future historians looks back at the Bush Doctrine and its unprecedented pursuit of Pax Americana as the critical  moment when hubris and strategic overreach resulted in the slipping of US hegemony and the rise of new global powers destined to make the 21st Century the Chinese or Indian—and not yet another American—Century?  Second, would Bush’s economic legacy be a continued protection and preservation of the pro-business and laissez faire policies of the Reagan Revolution?  Or would the worst economic downturn in generations result in a public repudiation of the laissez faire policies that had dominated US policy for the previous generation?

Was Vice President Richard Cheney, undoubtedly the most powerful  occupant of the office in history, too powerful, too much of a Svengali, too much the unaccountable puppetmaster? Had his rigorous pursuit of governmental privatization resulting in the unprecedented rise of the use of unaccountable outside contractors irredeemably obliterated  the line between public and private sector?   Had Bush, through his unrelenting drive for unrestrained executive privilege and power, resurrected the ghost of the Nixonian Imperial Presidency with long-term—and potentially dangerous—implications for American constitutional balance?  Had the administration’s embracing of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which had, according to international institutions and human rights groups, many foreign governments and even previous American standards, crossed the line into torture—irreparably eroded US’ global image and influence as to offset any strategic gains from such tactics?  Had the Bush administration’s aggressions in the War on Terror crossed the lines into war crimes? So dramatic, ultimately, was the Bush presidency that such issues—each critical in their own right—pale in comparison with his legacy of war and economic collapse.

Bush’s legacy might ultimately, therefore,  hang on the consonant “D.”   Would the  economic crises left in Bush’s wake be labeled a “Depression” by future historians, the worst economic crisis in a century?  If so, Bush’s fate may well be to be remembered as a 21st century Herbert Hoover.  If the economic events of 2008 are eventually, though,  seen as a recession—a particularly bad one, no doubt, but one of a number of such bumps in the road to greater national prosperity—Bush may end up being seen as a Jimmy Carter or a G.H.W. Bush, a president who had the misfortune to see the economy hit a snag on their watch but, otherwise, had some significant victories to look back on.  That George W. Bush might, though, one day be reconsidered and recast in the light of a modern-day Harry Truman—someone who left office underappreciated and unpopular but whom, in the hindsight of history, would see his reputation and legacy restored–seems unlikely, claims and protests of President Bush to the contrary.  When Harry Truman left office in January, 1953,  the unpopular Korean war that began on his watch would be over inside of six months. Gains in income, standard of living, education and home ownership were the greatest during any presidency of American history.  Unemployment had been all but banished as  eleven million new jobs were created.  Social security benefits had doubled.  Wages—including the minimum wage—increased across the board. Millions of returning veterans had gone to university under the GI Bill  (an extension of which for Iraqi and Afghani war veterans  Bush himself had opposed as costing too much.) The country was set to move through a decade that would later be named the Fabulous Fifties and Harry Truman would be seen as one of its creators. 

Such was not to the case at the exit of  George Walker Bush. 43rd president of the United States, from the national political stage.  In a  highly publicized poll of over a hundred historians conducted in April, 2008, sixty-one percent of the professional historians rated Bush as the worst president in history; ninety-eight percent rated his Presidency a failure.   The public was no less severe in its final judgment, awarding him the lowest outgoing approval ratings in modern history—the exact inverse of the valediction his predecessor received. His own political party seemed to go out of its way to repudiate him throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, with not one contender to replace him as GOP standard bearer invoking the name “Bush” in their campaign. Each claimed to be, in their own way, Reagan men.  Bush was further repudiated at his party’s summer nominating convention where  he was allowed to attend only as a ghostly video image on a screen, so loathe had his party  become at being seen actually physically associating with the man they had raucously re-nominated four years before.  Bush suffered indignity even in the quality of the indignities heaped upon him in his final months in office.  Richard Nixon, resigning in disgrace, went on to see operas written about the drama that was the man. Indeed, as Bush packed up his personal effects in the White House the movie dramatization of the Frost-Nixon interviews was playing to rave reviews. Nixon got operas and academy award nominations. George W. Bush satirical-comedy: Will Ferrell, his dumb-meets-dumber television doppelganger, playing him viscerally on Broadway in  “You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush.” For his legacy to recover from such an immediate and harsh historical judgment seems dubious.  Then again, that the prodigal son of a prominent New England  family might rebrand himself a son of the Texas south, might overcome his hellion youth to become an icon of solid family values, might overcome his personal and familial  penchant for political loss to become the most successful Republican politician in a generation, was dubiousness incarnate.   Dubya  made a career of accomplishing the dubious. His final hope was that he might do the same with history’s perception of his presidential legacy.   

In the Money

I got my e-invitation to the San Diego County Tax Payer’s Association’s 14^th Annual Golden Watchdog and Golden Fleece Awards.  The event’s being held this year on May 13 at the tony Town and Country Resort in Mission Valley (right down the street from the entity that used to be known as the Union Tribune but may one day in the not too distant future be known as the Union Condominiums…)

I’m passing on attendance. 

It’s not just that I (and many of the taxpayers the SDCTPA claims to represent) have ideological disagreements with a group that is knee-jerk reactionary when it comes to any mention of enhanced public revenues (aka blood-sucking taxes.)  Even higher taxes,  on occasion, serve a public good even though most of us—even my self, on most occasions—do not like paying them. It’s not just that I have a minor irritation with the SDCTPA over its name, as I’ve written about before.  The SDCTPA does not represent all tax payers in San Diego county (I do believe that is the task assigned to the progressive jazz quintet known as the Board of Supervisors.) Yet, that they don’t more accurately call themselves the San Diego County Republican & Libertarian Tax Payer’s Association is only a small quibble.

It’s not even my annoyance that, while the SDCTPA loves to ridicule the ridiculous spending of public institutions (spending which, at least, purports and attempts to do something for this thing called the public good)  it says not a peep about the ridiculous spending of the private sector (Sunroad, debasement of the Padre Brand over a de-nuptialization, ghost-town developments in Eastlake, not to mention pretty much anything happening within a hundred klicks of Wallstreet these days ring a bell, anybody?)  These days (and for much of the last generation) the true fleecing of America has come courtesy of the best and the brightest minds of the Wharton, Harvard and Chicago schools of business.

No, my ultimate reason for passing on the tax-paying bashing binge is much more parochial: the $200/head dinner price.  Unless the chicken is really that good, seems to me the SDCTAA should put themselves on the menu for a fleecing award.

Hmmm, the SDCTAA celebrates the exposure of government waste at a $200 per person event.   I wonder just which tax brackets their membership comes from… 

Flipping the Bird

Move over idle downtown construction crane, the previous reigning bird-symbol of San Diego municipal malaise.  San Diego has a new City Fowl:  the Lame Duck.

First Jerry Sanders gets reelected last June to a second, dead-end term as Mayor.  Termed out in 2012 there’s already been speculation that his mayorship might get gubernatorial fever by 2010.  Note that Jerry has been a three to six year wonder in his recent gigs at the PD, United Way and Red Cross. Sticking with it for a seven year haul is something out of character for Gentleman Jer.  Yet even if he sticks it out for the full term he becomes increasingly marginalized after the 2010 Council elections when the question “Who’s Next?” begins dominating the tongues of the chattering classes. 

Now Ben Hueso announces his plan to try and bail on City governance by 2010.  No long term San Diego future for that bright young ambitious man.   So with the two principle leaders of San Diego government aiming for the door, how much pressure and influence are they going to be able to generate dealing with the matters of the here and now?  With the multiplicity of boards he serves on, Hueso is already spread in his energies and attention about as thin as a spritz of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Throw in a run for Assembly and pretty much the only thing he’ll have time to use his Council office for his to store newspaper clippings. 

Meanwhile the city drifts on towards a pension and foreclosure precipice of fiscal doom.

Note to City Council:  You already screwed up once passing over the brightest bulb on your political marquee, Donna Frye in favor of the more political and less influential Ben Hueso.  If he’s turning himself into a self-inflicted lame duck, might you not at least want to consider turning over the gavel to the a lame duck Donna and her greater gravitas?  Might you atleast  consider giving Ben an early good-bye present by stripping him of all that time-consuming responsibility of being council president so he can pursue his higher  aspirations and elevate one of your fellow members whose shelf life is longer than 2010?

But, then, this is San Diego, where we force out of  touch nice guy Republican mayors to resign so we can replace them with out of  touch nice guy Republican mayors and make the lightest-weight council members Council President skipping over the established talent. 

That the city should endure a couple of years of Lame Duck leadership is truly lame. It’s also truly San Diego.

Et Tu UT

It was with great sadness that I read yesterday of the sale of the Union Tribune to a private equity group and the ending of decades of Copley Press in this, America’s finest city.  Great sadness, that is, because I didn’t read about such a sale a year ago.  Or five.  Or ten.  Or twenty-five.  The UT—particularly its editorial page brought to you courtesy of Bob “Bowtie because if its not the 1950s then it darn as well should be” Kittle and his band of un-renown known the UT  Editorially Bored–has been in reverse-lockstep with the people of San Diego since Ronald Reagan hung up the spurs and went back to the Ranch in the 1980s.   One can only hope the new owners can take steps to bring the paper into maybe at least the early Clinton years?  Hey, hint for the new guys:  Why not save big money and just run 20 year old editions of the SF Chronicle or NY Times with a UT logo over it.  Even if it’s not topical it’d still me more readable and applicable to the lives of most San Diegans than the current kitty-liter liner has proven to be. 

So little time,  so much to vent and celebrate

This may well prove to be the best moment for San Diegans of a progressive bent since Donna Frye won the mayor’s office  back in 2005!  (Oh, what might have been had the UT sale occurred a half-decade ago….)

For more of my UT hope and loathing check Tony Perry’s blog in the LA Times.

Champagne, anyone?  

Bonus Round

So AIG took the public money ($170 billion worth) and then gave executive bonuses ($165 million.) So what else is new? Lee “I Did It My Way (With A Paltry $1.2 Billion Dollar Government Loan)” Iacocca and his band of brothers did the same back in 1980. Hey, corporate executives just took billions in the peoples’ money to clean up after your economic incompetence. What are you going to do next? Screw Disneyland. Millions in bonuses for being smart enough to ask government for billions in bailouts are due. Break out the 1907 Heidsieck champagne for one and all. Let the little people sip the Cool Aid.

Obama blasts them. Pundits punish them. Comedians ridicule them. And average people start thinking that a return of the guillotine might be a more timely retro moment than the comeback in ‘80s fashions. But, for all the chest beating and hand-wringing AIG executives simply claim their hands are tied—contracts (the kind Corporate America loves to shred when they involve workers or consumers) force them to pay those huge bonuses out. Contracts they negotiated with themselves to pay themselves huge amounts of money which they now claim they must pay—and receive–the taxpayer be damned.

OK, so be it. You pays your money you takes your chances, taxpayers. Chuck Schumer’s idea that we’ll just tax it back is so much bluster—tax increases aimed at a handful of people will never clear the Senate, let alone the courts. So hang up those angry-tax-payer-we-want-a –lynching-suits, everyone.

And put on your angry shareholder suits, instead.

We the People are now the 80% shareholders of AIG. We the People purchased those shares under false pretenses and assumptions (lack of full disclosure and transparency, fraud, lies, call it whatever legalese is needed.) The government should launch an immediate shareholders lawsuit on behalf of We the People against the AIG management, board and each individual recipient of these bonuses for gross managerial negligence or whatever the shareholder lawyers bash misanthropic managers with.

Hirer the best, highest paid Shareholder Shysters the Treasury can afford, give them 10% of the take and let them loose like the starved wolves Harvard and Yale trained them to be. Tie those bonuses up in court until their would-be recipients are little old derivative managers. Go after their personal assets as civil penalties—let them see what its like to be foreclosed on, to have their limos repoed, their kids told there’s no money to send them to that nice school or for band lessons. Force a Board shuffle that results in everyone at the top, from CEO Hank Greenberg to Chairman Edward Liddy on down being fired for cause. Let them spend a few months/years in the ranks of the unemployed and property-less. It would be a crueler punishment than prison.

You don’t even have to carry through on the lawsuits. The threat alone, properly delivered (if anyone has a few extra horse heads their not using and would like to contribute them to a good cause…) might well shake the AIG gurus of galloping gall out of their “We are the Lords of all we survey” complacency.

And if they are so totally detached from reality as not to realize just how close to a French Revolution moment they have come, then go ahead and sue ‘em. Sue ‘em ‘til their eyes bleed, their wallets implode and they become the most reviled symbols of greed gone bad since Marie Antoinette.

Cry havoc and release the sharks of righteous litigation.

Doobie Brothers

What a brotherhood exists between the US and Mexico.  We smoke pot.  Lots of it.  (With some 42% of Americans having whiffed weed at least on occasion,  leading the world in cannabis consumption according to the WHO, one now understands why so many Krispy Kreme’s opened in recent years…)   We have guns. Lots of them. (Over 200 million, according to the Brits.) 

Meanwhile our brethren to the south have poverty. Lots of it.  And access to pot.  Some 25 million tons of it a year.  So we give money to Mexican pot smugglers who use it by US guns to then shoot other Mexican pot smugglers (and cops, politicians, journalists, women, children and any other form of life who gets between the business end of an Uzi and an intended target).  

What a perfect, symbiotic relationship.

And look at the advantages to both sides! Both make money off trade.  People get employed. Consumers get products.  The freest of free market competition reigns This is David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage leading to mutually beneficial trade made real.  Indeed, except for all those bodies everywhere, the US/Mexican pot relationship is neo-liberal globalization at its best,  Everybody wins.  Except, of course, for all those pesky dead bodies.  Mexico has lots of them.  Over a thousand in January alone.  And except, of course, for Mexican civil society and democracy, which has pretty much collapsed in Juarez and is teetering in TJ.  And then there are US tax payers, shelling out tens of billions a year to arrest  and incarcerate hundreds of millions of tokers.

But America’s 70 year pot prohibition stills continues to give and give: drug lords get rich,  prison guards get employed and Mexican undertakers have to literally stack up the clients business being so good.  And, best of all all those Americans  who don’t smoke pot, don’t want to smoke pot (heck, they’re plenty happy with old man tobacco and devil whiskey—two other deadly vices the US leads the world in) can continue to take tremendous solace that their cheap, moral thrill of superiority still trumps the cost in ruined—and ended—lives on both sides of the border.

Oh, America and Mexico. Let that  Philadelphia Freedom sing.

I wrote over a year ago that Tijuana (and, now,  most of northern Mexico) is burning while we, their brethren, pay them no heed.  Now the fire is an inferno that is incinerating our neighbors to the south  and is beginning to engulf our own communities on this side of the border.  And, beyond calls to man that border with troops, no-one seems to care. 

Note to President Obama: foreign policy begins at home.  For what does it gain a president to win a victory in Afghanistan if he loses Mexico right on his doorstep. 

 

Positive Some Game

Found this (click here)   in my in basket today from a group called Project Win Win, a  new online non-profit organization  working on a bill to “restore representative government.   You can take their survey here.

Another off-the-wall group?  Visionaries?  You decide.  Then again, if Rush Limbaugh can emerge as the legitimate  voice of conservatism,  anything must go.

Barack Obama’s 1st Joint Address: A Chronology

From the Secret Service Report, POTUS, February 23, 2009

8:00p– Dresses in White House private residence, putting on pants both legs at one time

8:30p– Passes on car.  Elects instead to walk across the reflecting pool to the Capitol building.

8:50p– Enters Capitol Building.  Two doves briefly alight on his shoulder and a stream of brilliant sunlight through parted clouds shines upon him.  Which is all the more remarkable because it is night.

9:03p– Is announced to the joint session by the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms.  Nancy Pelosi swoons for the first time.

9:04p– Works his way through the crowd of lesser mortals – Congressmen, Senators, Justices, Admirals, Generals and the miscellaneous powerful.  Gives a manly handshake and hand-on-the-shoulder to the men folk and a suave peck to the ladies.  The men feel gypped.

9:06p– Greet Justices of the Supreme Court. Stops to lay hands on Associate Justice Anton Scalia who,  as touched, immediately experiences the terror  felt by all the wildlife he shot on hunting trips with Dick Cheney.  Scalia leaves the Chamber shortly afterwards, shaken, and begins writing a new opinion reversing  District of Columbia v. Heller.

9:08–Ascends the dais.  Nancy Pelosi swoons for the second time.  Shakes hands with VP Joe Biden (who, unfortunately, continues to wear his Gagworks hand buzzer) and Speaker Pelosi (who swoons for the third and fourth times.)

9:09p–Lays out agenda for American economic salvation.  Highlights includes plans to trim the national debt by replacing the Federal student hot lunch program with a Presidential loaves and fishes plan in which he will feed all students in America from one basket.

10:05p– Finishes speech and exits chamber to thunderous ovation. Nancy Pelosi swoons for the fifth time.  

10:15p–Walks back to the White House. Along the way parts the waters of the Tidal Basin to allow currents of bipartisanship to freely flow.

10:45p–Reaches White House.  Stops off in the kitchen and make cheese sandwich. Discovers mixing the Bleu de Gex  and Garstang Blue Lancashire cheese molds produces a cure for cancer.  Plans for morning announcement, right after securing permanent peace settlement in the Middle East.

10:46p– Nancy Pelosi swoons for the sixth time.

Funny thing, that.  At least half of the above probably happened.

Fractackular

I’ve been watching  the final season of the Sci Fi channel’s resurrected 1970s Sci Fic hoke-classic, Battlestar Galactica.  The current incarnation of this human-made-machines-out-to-destroy-humankind  saga is far better acted, has far better effects and a much more commanding dramtic plotline than did the original.  (In which Loren Greene, fresh from 200 years on Bonanza, played essentially Ben Cartwright in command of a Battlestar rather than the Ponderosa.  But we sci fi buffs found it cool because a) it was the only real sci fi on TV; b) it’s pre Star Wars effects were awesome for their time; and c) we were twelve  years old.)   And, being on cable, the show’s writers can take certain liberties with plot and language which a network couldn’t back in the 1970s.  A result of which is that, in watching the show these past weeks,  I’ve finally decoded the ultimate message of the Republican party.

And, no, it’s not that Republicans remind me of Cylons, the race of evil human-looking machines  that never eat or sleep, like to nuke puppies and toddlers and  wreak havoc  across the galaxy in their quest to pursue their Cylon-god driven destiny. I mean,  Dick Cheney, liked to eat, after all,   They have that on tape.  And I think he slept (though that “man-sized safe” in the VP’s office Jon Stewart used to joke about might have actually been a coffin).  But Dick Cheney did share a taste for diction with the Colonial soldiers and sailors who battled the Cylons, as does the Republican party in general.   Whenever Starbuck, the sexy and brooding tomboy ace fighter pilot, or Admiral Odama (played memorably by Edward James Olmos) is angered past propriety or the Colonial President is sick of the political squabbling or any other member of the human refugee community is caught in a moment of anger, panic or surprise they all have the same thing to say:

“Frack!”

Yes, the Sci Fi channel let the writers of Battlestar Galatica drop the “F-bomb” but, being basic access cable, it’s a watered-down,  kinder, gentler “F-bomb” than the one heard on premium cable. 

Which is just like the Republicans’ basic message to the American people (you remember the American people–that “bunch of whiners” as McCain economic guru  and former senator “Dr. Phil” Graham labeled them) .   Now Dick “F-Man” Cheney, wasn’t  above dropping the ‘F-Bomb” in full mega-tonnage on the  floor of the Senate itself.  And Rush is just DYING to drop it.  (And if he’s not careful one of these days he’s going to slip during one of his “Screw Them” rants and end up jostling for satellite bandwidth with  potty-mouth Howard Stern.  Oh to dream…)

 Most Republicans though try to water their F-bombing down,  wrapping it in clichés and pontifications just like the Battlestar writers had to replace a vowel and add a consonant.  But it all comes down to the same sentiment:

Republicans to America:  “Frack You.”

Detroit is burning to the financial ground last semester?  Congressional Republicans to the backbone US Industry:  Frack You.  America’s economy is burning to the ground right now. Congressional Republicans response to the stimulus package and the American people its supposed to help: “Frack You.” And a good Frack You to you too, Mr. “Just elected by the American  People by a clear popular majority as a rebuke to the last 8 years of GOP mismanagement & misjudgment  and still enjoys extraordinarily-High Approval-ratings of the level that should make the outgoing GOP president weep in shame and yet still stretched out a bipartisan hand which Congressional Republican’s partisanly spit in” President.

And its not just the current Congressional Republicans who’ve embraced the Battlestar battle cry.  It’s been the basic message of  Reagan Republicans to Americans for the last generation.  You’re a woman dumb enough to get pregnant? Frack You and your right to an abortion, prenatal care,  post-natal care,  paid maternity leave, child care and family health care.  And Frack your right to affordable and available contraception.   And Frack your kids, too.  If they don’t like being born in a country with the highest infant mortality rates of any developed society, they shouldn’t have been born here.   And your Asthma sufferering, peanut-allergic kids? They don’t want to breathe my second hand smoke or risk accidentally swapping sandwiches with my Peter Pan munching rug rat?  Frack them.

You want me to give up my SUV to help avoid environmental meltdown?  Give up my unlicensed gun, my high-powered convertible semi automatic or my thirty-eight handgun?  Frack you. And frack Mother Earth  and homicide victims,  respectively.   

Indeed, the GOP’s answer to just about any request that one modifies any personal behavior or bear any cost to in any way promote any notion or action intended to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, or secure any  blessing of liberty for anyone but themselves is simple,  clear and resounding.

Frack you, America.

So, American people, get onboard with the Republican universal response mantra. November,  2010,  American People’s response to Republican candidates:

Frack you, GOP.