The more things change...

Same costumes, same rage... but much, much older.

Latest Sarah Sighting

Today I was browsing at the Barnes & Noble newsstand and spotted an entire magazine devoted to Sarah Palin. On the cover, in large font: "Sarah Palin -- Can she save America ?" As I wrote on Facebook, this is the one question to which everyone believes they have the correct answer.

I wasn't bored enough to skim through the Palin magazine, which sells for nine bucks, but I think I got the basic idea behind its marketing. I've decided that virtually all Palin supporters fall into one of two categories: (A) those who think her raw sex appeal is icing on the cake, or (B) those who think her hardcore right-wing political beliefs are icing on the cake.

Doctor No

Over the weekend, the local newspaper used its editorial page for an analysis of the major bills passed by Congress in 2009, and how members of the House and Senate from Texas voted on each one. There were no major surprises, with Republicans and Democrats voting pretty much as one would expect.

I may have missed something in the small print, but it looks like the blue ribbon for consistent negativity in 2009 goes to Rep. Ron Paul, the R from District 14 also known for creating a very minor ripple on the presidential campaign trail in 2008.

There were fourteen House bills identified as significant in the news analysis, and Ron Paul voted on thirteen of them. He didn't vote/abstained on HR 3081, the foreign affairs budget bill that essentially funded 12 more months of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Does that mean he hates the troops ? It once did, as I recall.

Paul voted in favor of two bills that were both ultimately defeated. Of course, he voted "YES" on the Republican alternative health care reform bill, as did every other Republican in the Texas delegation. A "NO" vote on that one would have been unpardonable. He also voted in favor of a Republican attempt to soften consumer financial protection regulations, which was another party-line vote supported by a few Texas Dems with Hispanic surnames.

That leaves 11 of the 14 bills that Paul voted against. Even bottom-feeders like Pete Sessions and Louie Gohmert only voted "NO" eight times. When people refer to the GOP as The Party of No, they must have Ron Paul in mind.

Practical mathematical applications

The weather made a radical change yesterday, turning cold and rainy --- more like December than March. Today the sun was back, but it was still cold and windy. When I left the house to walk, it was 49 degrees with a wind chill factor of 41 degrees.

The first leg of my walk is 1.4 miles and I had the wind behind me, pushing me along, and was able to trot using roughly the same amount of energy as brisk walking. That was the good part.

When I made the loop to start the 1.6 mile return to home base, I was walking straight into the teeth of those 30 mph wind blasts. I'm not an engineer, but I figure I'm walking in one direction at 3.8 mph, and the wind is blowing in the opposite direction at 30 mph... well, you do the math.

The best analogy I can come up with is that my trip home today was like walking 1.6 miles in a shoulder-deep pool of tapioca pudding. By the time I walked into the house, I felt like I'd been dragging an anti-freeze can full of concrete, like the one my dad used as a boat anchor when I was a lad.

I don't know exactly how it works, but I believe whoever's in charge of life should award bonus points to older men who spend thirty minutes walking into the wind.

PS: When I was a little boy, I dropped that boat anchor on a toad to see what would happen. Maybe atonement requires walking long distances into bitterly cold winds... you think ?

Who asked you, Karl ?

Karl Rove, who displays hermaphroditic characteristics and whose single claim to fame was as the chief handholder to former President C.W. Moss, is on a book publicity tour, as are nearly all conservatives. Today, he's the subject of an interview in USA Today, in which he suggests that the Teapeople could damage the Republican Party if their anti-government insanity allows them to be exploited and manipulated by third-party candidates.

I hate to break the news to Karl, but there are a lot of Teapeople who are now claiming to hate C.W. Moss as much as the typical Democrat did from 2001-2008. Many insist that C.W. was really a liberal who tricked them with lies, then deny they voted for him enthusiastically not once, but twice. Of course, given the advanced age and limited mental acuity of a lot of Baggers, it's possible their memories have failed them.

At any rate, Karl is paid too much money to express his opinions on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal, especially considering his influence and direct involvement in the eight years of the C.W. fiasco. Maybe he's right about something for a change. We'll see.

For those who've forgotten or tried to purge their brains of the memory, here's a shot of former President C.W. Moss at his ranch in Crawford, Texas as he prepares for his State of the Union address.

Hippie-esque ?

The column by David Brooks refers to the teapeople as Walmart hippies, and tries to compare the teabag troopers of 2010 to the new left radicals of the mid- to late 1960s. It's a reasonable comparison, but I'm old enough to have lived through the anti-war, anti-establishment sixties, and could probably trace many of my current opinions back to the lessons and experiences of that era. The difference between the movements that catches my attention, at least based on what I'm seeing in the media, is significant. The radical movement of the 1960s was made up primarily of young people, most under thirty --- one of their anthems was "My Generation" by the Who, which included the line, "Hope I die before I get old." Old at that time defined as over 30.

The teabag troupers, on the other hand, are already old judging from the pictures of their assemblies I've seen on television and the internet. Old people who don't have anything better to do than bitch about their taxes and get in the way. From what I've seen, for every teabagger under thirty there are five on the north end of middle age, and at least two of those are old and wrinkled. As they get older, people start tiring more easily, so my guess is that the teapeople should make whatever moves they plan to make really soon. In a few years Obama will be gone and there won't be any Ns in the White House to inflame teabag passion. A lot of the baggers will be too sleepy to demonstrate, and a significant number will have resigned from life. Eventually, young people will be asking each other, "Remember those old timers who used to hang teabags on their hats ? Whatever happened to them ?"

Craziness

Frank Rich is a dependable op-ed page reference, and the topic in this recent column is the emergence of Tommy Teabag as a political force in this country. I've been one of those whose tendency is to trivialize and heap scorn on the teapeople, but out of respect for Rich, I may need to rethink my position. I've often said that I love America; I just despise 51 percent of the people who live here. As things stand, I don't believe that the teapeople are anywhere near fifty percent of the voting population, but there may be more of them than I thought there were.

Okay, so there are traces of anarchy in the atmosphere. My orientation is to support the government, having spent so many years as part of it, and I have absolutely no use for the extremist attitudes currently receiving so much media attention and free publicity. I've had other things on my plate worth worrying about lately, so I don't need these fucking lunatics deciding the rules don't apply to them. When a crazy person decides his political cause is worth dying for, as some teapeople have, the problem is not that he dies for his cause, but that he takes other people with him who were trying to mind their own business.