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Perry: Government you can TRUST.

Started by Doktor Howl, August 17, 2011, 06:33:50 PM

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Anna Mae Bollocks

Here. Change the title to "NOT GAY PERRY", womp his head on the girl kitty, and put 'em both in fetish outfts.

Stella

Has been living in the train wreck of his "governing" since 2002 and doesn't give a fuck what it takes to make that piece of shit go away.

Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

PopeTom

Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 13, 2011, 06:20:07 PM
Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:17:59 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on September 13, 2011, 03:46:44 PM
I'm sort of on board with Cram, in the sense that I really like a lot of gay people, and I in no way want douchebags like Perry and Mr Bachmann associated with GLORIOUS FAGGOTRY.

They're just not fabulously awesome enough.

So, if we want to run with this, why don't we take it literally?  "Rick Perry is so not gay.  You can tell by his poor fashion sense, by the way he dances, and the fact that he's an utter shitbag."



"Being gay is cool.  Being Rick Perry isn't.  PERRY: NOT EVEN ONCE."

As a man with a shitbag I feel the need to speak up.
I would never compare my shitbag to Rick Perry. 
My shitbag serves a useful purpose.


Two useful purposes.

You're never without a condom.

And here I was all this time using the condom in my wallet as an emergency shitbag.
-PopeTom

I am the result of 13.75 ± 0.13 billion years of random chance. Now that I exist I see no reason to start planning and organizing everything in my life.

Random dumb luck got me here, random dumb luck will get me to where I'm going.

Hail Eris!

Doktor Howl

Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:29:04 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 13, 2011, 06:20:07 PM
Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:17:59 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on September 13, 2011, 03:46:44 PM
I'm sort of on board with Cram, in the sense that I really like a lot of gay people, and I in no way want douchebags like Perry and Mr Bachmann associated with GLORIOUS FAGGOTRY.

They're just not fabulously awesome enough.

So, if we want to run with this, why don't we take it literally?  "Rick Perry is so not gay.  You can tell by his poor fashion sense, by the way he dances, and the fact that he's an utter shitbag."



"Being gay is cool.  Being Rick Perry isn't.  PERRY: NOT EVEN ONCE."

As a man with a shitbag I feel the need to speak up.
I would never compare my shitbag to Rick Perry. 
My shitbag serves a useful purpose.


Two useful purposes.

You're never without a condom.

And here I was all this time using the condom in my wallet as an emergency shitbag.

:lol:
Molon Lube

PopeTom

Though I will question why just stick to the term 'gay'.

Why not a whole campaign based around a picture or Rick Perry and a 'Not <derogatory slur>'
-PopeTom

I am the result of 13.75 ± 0.13 billion years of random chance. Now that I exist I see no reason to start planning and organizing everything in my life.

Random dumb luck got me here, random dumb luck will get me to where I'm going.

Hail Eris!

Doktor Howl

Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:31:01 PM
Though I will question why just stick to the term 'gay'.

Why not a whole campaign based around a picture or Rick Perry and a 'Not <derogatory slur>'

Yeah, we just went through this entire conversation.

In the last 2-3 pages.
Molon Lube

PopeTom

Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 13, 2011, 06:32:55 PM
Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:31:01 PM
Though I will question why just stick to the term 'gay'.

Why not a whole campaign based around a picture or Rick Perry and a 'Not <derogatory slur>'

Yeah, we just went through this entire conversation.

In the last 2-3 pages.

I looked more like people disagreeing with the meme by using other derogatory terms as an example.
Not actually in favor of just throwing it all into the gristmill.

Rick Perry: Not a monkey
-PopeTom

I am the result of 13.75 ± 0.13 billion years of random chance. Now that I exist I see no reason to start planning and organizing everything in my life.

Random dumb luck got me here, random dumb luck will get me to where I'm going.

Hail Eris!

Doktor Howl

Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:38:14 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 13, 2011, 06:32:55 PM
Quote from: PopeTom on September 13, 2011, 06:31:01 PM
Though I will question why just stick to the term 'gay'.

Why not a whole campaign based around a picture or Rick Perry and a 'Not <derogatory slur>'

Yeah, we just went through this entire conversation.

In the last 2-3 pages.

I looked more like people disagreeing with the meme by using other derogatory terms as an example.
Not actually in favor of just throwing it all into the gristmill.

Rick Perry: Not a monkey

Then you missed the bit about Perry being the face of homophobia today, which is the whole point of the exercise?
Molon Lube

Telarus

Oooh, this thread's got some teeth. I ran into an interesting synchronicity recently. I had been reading the Bachmann GASM thread, and this, and then I ran in to these two articles (relevant bits quoted, but I probably missed some, and they're pretty good pieces):



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/how-the-apocalyptic-gop-is-dragging-us-into-a-civil-war-20110907

QuoteI'm probably late in seeing it, but Lofgren's piece [2nd link, below -Tel] raises fascinating and terrifying questions about the future of our political system and the increasing possibility that we are headed toward something like a civil war, or a constitutional crisis.
...
Bush and Rove were willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives, and the lives of American servicemen, for oil and votes. But this current crew of Republicans shook canisters of kerosene over the entire American population and threatened to light a match if it didn't get what it wanted.

As Lofgren notes, this was insurrectionary, revolutionary behavior. Only the massive scale of the gambit prevented it from being easily identified as terrorism and criminal blackmail. If in exchange for not defaulting on our debt Boehner, Hensarling, Cantor and the rest of them had asked for a billion dollars worth of gold bullion deposited in Swiss bank accounts, or the release of a dozen Baader-Meinhofs from German prisons, it could hardly have been much different from what they actually did.
...
But for the new GOP, compromise of any kind defeats their central purpose, which is political totale krieg. This party's entire reason for being is conflict and aggression. There is no underlying patriotic instinct to find middle ground with the rest of us, because the party doesn't have a vision for society that includes anyone outside the tent.

I've always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it's intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.

But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we're used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin. [Emphasis mine. -Tel]

Reading Lofgren's piece, and a piece by John Judis of the New Republic, makes one realize that we came pretty close to real chaos in that debt ceiling debate. Had Obama invoked emergency powers to raise the debt limit unilaterally – and I think he had good reasons to do that – we might have had a revolt on our hands.

Most people aren't thinking about this because we're so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it's headed in another, more twisted direction. I'm beginning to wonder if this election season is going to be one none of us ever forget – a 1968 on crack. Anyway, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope everyone reads this Lofgren piece, which is a rare piece of insider insight.



http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

QuoteBoth parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
...
As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
...
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"



So, how can we use this info?
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Cain

I don't think there is much that can be done with it.  An economic civil war is more rationally efficient than the more traditional type, but that's about all that can be said in favour of it.

The problems are, in order of most pressing to least, education, a huge religious constituency and plutonomic interests using to get their own way.  Those problems are way too big for any individual, or even small group to tackle.  They could be reversed, but only with decades of effort, which naturally wont happen with one party threatening to destroy the country every few months.

Taibbi said it perfectly:

QuoteBut for the new GOP, compromise of any kind defeats their central purpose, which is political totale krieg. This party's entire reason for being is conflict and aggression. There is no underlying patriotic instinct to find middle ground with the rest of us, because the party doesn't have a vision for society that includes anyone outside the tent.

This is the kind of thing Stop the Spirit of Zossen (written by an anonymous, well-connected, foreign policy-orientated Republican) has been saying for years now.  He said, basically, the worst nightmares of Glenn Greenwald, the Daily Kos crowd, Digby etc are all pretty much dead on.  The Republicans are a political death-cult, worshipping Macht above all.  They've imported reactionary thinking, European thinking opposed to the spirit of 1789, in their attacks on Liberalism, and in doing so they're undermining the entire liberal tradition (of course, theoretically, the Republicans are liberal conservatives, historically.  Now, definitely not).  They're not playing for usual political goals, by usual political means.  They're aimed at total, existential war with everyone who disagrees with them and is not part of the Movement, and as such will use any and all obstructive, legislative and media means to destroy their opponents.

Dems and media types are flailing around and failing precisely because they do not understand this and continue to treat the Republicans as just another party, acting by normal democratic rules.

Anna Mae Bollocks

Quote from: Cain on September 14, 2011, 11:18:01 AM
I don't think there is much that can be done with it.  An economic civil war is more rationally efficient than the more traditional type, but that's about all that can be said in favour of it.

The problems are, in order of most pressing to least, education, a huge religious constituency and plutonomic interests using to get their own way.  Those problems are way too big for any individual, or even small group to tackle.  They could be reversed, but only with decades of effort, which naturally wont happen with one party threatening to destroy the country every few months.

Taibbi said it perfectly:

QuoteBut for the new GOP, compromise of any kind defeats their central purpose, which is political totale krieg. This party's entire reason for being is conflict and aggression. There is no underlying patriotic instinct to find middle ground with the rest of us, because the party doesn't have a vision for society that includes anyone outside the tent.

This is the kind of thing Stop the Spirit of Zossen (written by an anonymous, well-connected, foreign policy-orientated Republican) has been saying for years now.  He said, basically, the worst nightmares of Glenn Greenwald, the Daily Kos crowd, Digby etc are all pretty much dead on.  The Republicans are a political death-cult, worshipping Macht above all.  They've imported reactionary thinking, European thinking opposed to the spirit of 1789, in their attacks on Liberalism, and in doing so they're undermining the entire liberal tradition (of course, theoretically, the Republicans are liberal conservatives, historically.  Now, definitely not).  They're not playing for usual political goals, by usual political means.  They're aimed at total, existential war with everyone who disagrees with them and is not part of the Movement, and as such will use any and all obstructive, legislative and media means to destroy their opponents.

Dems and media types are flailing around and failing precisely because they do not understand this and continue to treat the Republicans as just another party, acting by normal democratic rules.

Nazis.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

deadfong

Quote from: Cain on September 14, 2011, 11:18:01 AM
Dems and media types are flailing around and failing precisely because they do not understand this and continue to treat the Republicans as just another party, acting by normal democratic rules.

This is so  :horrormirth:

I'm beginning to think there has to be some kind of willful blindness going on within the Democratic party and the media, because the Republican all-or-nothing (literally nothing, if we don't get our way, we're burning all of it to the fucking ground) strategy has been obvious for months.

What I can't understand is, if it is willful blindness, why are they doing it?  How do they benefit from deliberately ignoring that their "colleagues across the aisle" are all unmasked sociopaths?

Anna Mae Bollocks

Because they're working for the same interests. It's a farce, you know that.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Cramulus

http://www.bigamistsforperry.com/p/who-are-we.html

I am 75% sure this was created by a group of Discordians in Arkansas.  :lulz: :lulz:

Doktor Howl

Molon Lube

Cramulus

In other news... I've been meditating on this "gay perry" issue for a while now.

Recently, in political discussions, I've been advocating somebody (like Elizabeth Warren, Al Gore, whatever), and somebody points out some minor character flaw or some reason to be uncertain about that person's character. And my response to that has been --- "so"? I'm not waiting for the purehearted messiah to walk barefoot through the crowd and transform all of us. There is no political messiah who will sound the clarion call and transcend the partisan divide. We have to accept that the change we want will come from a cloudy, controversial figure.

If I don't hold people up to those standards of purity, why am I more picky about ideas?

and there are a million reasons.

But I've come around on this one. I think that Rick Perry sucks, and I'm okay with people taking shots at him, even if it partially accelerates the homophobic vibe already present in his constituency.

In this case I think the difference is that we're not aiming to create a homophobic discussion within our own "team".. we're creating the drama in already choppy waters. Capitalizing on other people's biases. I still think its murky, but I'm glad that people give a shit.