[Peace-discuss] Too good to miss
Rohn Koester
rohnkoester at hotmail.com
Sun Oct 17 10:02:26 CDT 2010
> Reid is a career politician, veteran of the stump speech, the extempore oration, > not to mention the formal rhetoric of a seasoned Solon. So how come he can > barely frame a sentence, or convey a simple thought?
In March, a couple of days after Reid announced his intention to run for a fifth term, his wife and daughter were almost killed when a semi-truck plowed into their car.
> Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:17:46 -0500
> From: galliher at illinois.edu
> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Too good to miss
>
> October 15 - 17, 2010
> Daughters of the Gipper
> By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
>
> Plump as a boudoir cushion, her dimpled countenance as rosy and excited as those
> of Watteau’s most gamesome courtesans, Christine O’Donnell established in her
> debate at the University of Delaware, that she is most certainly qualified to
> take a seat in the U.S. senate. I reached this conclusion after the Harry Reid /
> Sharron Angle debate in Las Vegas, where the two are neck and neck in the final
> run down to November 2. By the measure of the performance of the US Senate
> Majority leader, O’Donnell would shine in the Upper Chamber like Demosthenes.
> And next to Tea Partier Sharron Angle, a former state legislator, O’Donnell
> sounded like Aristotle.
>
> Reid is a career politician, veteran of the stump speech, the extempore oration,
> not to mention the formal rhetoric of a seasoned Solon. So how come he can
> barely frame a sentence, or convey a simple thought? In his two-minute opener he
> evoked his childhood in Searchlight, his mom taking in the washing from the
> brothels. Checking his notes and speaking in the halting tones of one unfamiliar
> with the English language, he limped through his core credo: "I believe my No. 1
> job is to create jobs as United States senator."
>
> Both Reid and Angle speak as though rejects from the Disney animation shop.
> “Stiff” is too limber an epithet to toss at them. The brightest bulb on the
> platform in Vegas PBS was Mitch Fox, host of Nevada Week in Review. Citing
> Angle’s notorious remark Fox asks, "Do you believe getting jobs is not your job?"
>
> Angle: "My job is to create the policies to encourage the private sector to do
> what they do best, and that is creating jobs."
>
> Fox: "So that means 'no'?"
>
> Angle nods in agreement.
>
> Reid responds. He boasts of ways he's helped bring jobs to Nevada through tax
> policy -- at McCarran Airport, at Harrah's, where, he said, "We saved 31,000
> jobs alone. My opponent is against those. My job is to create jobs. ... My
> opponent is extreme."
>
> Angle responds: "Harry Reid, it's not your job to create jobs. It's your job to
> create confidence to get the private sector to create jobs."
>
> This is insanity. We are in Nevada, as dependent on federal dollars as Limbaugh
> was once on Oxycontin. Nevada, home of the Hoover dam, of the nuclear test
> sites, of… of…. Vegas is filled with laid-off construction workers utterly
> dependent on a government check. And Harry can’t muster the strength to ridicule
> the utter absurdity of Angle denouncing the role of government. Already the
> audience is groaning and beginning to shuffle out.
>
> Mitch Fox again. He quizzes Angle on the fact that before the Republican primary
> she had referred to the need to "privatize" Social Security. Now she uses the
> term "personalize," as though the nature of one’s pension is a matter of
> aesthetic discrimination, like chosing an underarm spray.
>
> "Why did you change your position on Social Security?" Fox asked.
>
> She said she used the word "personalize" because it described a type of personal
> retirement account that lawmakers, such as Harry Reid, have.
>
> Reid says other nations have tried personalizing retirement accounts with
> disastrous results. He doesn’t say simply that if the Social Security accounts
> had been handed to Wall Street, as George Bush had attempted to do back in 2004,
> anyone opting to withdraw their retirement money from Social Security would by
> now have starved to death.
>
> It’s time for the closing statements. Harry fumbles for his notes. "I am a
> fighter. I will continue to fight for what I believe is best for the American
> people."
>
> Angle: "People ask me why I smile so much," she says. "I am an optimist. Like
> Ronald Reagan, I believe in American exceptionalism."
>
> Let’s hear it for the Gipper! It was Reagan who brought total insanity into
> political life and installed it as a permanent prop.
>
> Back to Delaware. O’Donnell is wallowing in the polls, as many as 19 points
> behind Coons in many polls taken in the past few days. Battered by comedians for
> her strictures on masturbation, and for her imperishable campaign ad proclaiming
> “I am not a witch”, O’Donnell held her own against Coons and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer,
> who asked three times with increasing asperity whether she believes in evolution
> – a theory of biological development refuted on an hourly basis by CSPAN’s
> coverage of the deliberations of the US Congress.
>
> Turning aside Blitzer’s challenge, O’Donnell deprecated her personal beliefs as
> “irrelevant” , when set against her commitment to the U.S. Constitution – a clue
> that actually this Tea Party favorite is somewhat pragmatic in her
> politico-religious doctrines. A religious fundamentalist would have insisted
> that embedded in the U.S. Constitution is the divine law, with each article
> inscribed by the divine finger.
>
> O’Donnell offered another clue to her pragmatism, when invited to sketch out her
> program for the U. S. Department of Education. A conservative Republican would
> answer promptly, “Burn it to the ground.” O’Donnell said she did not see the
> need for so drastic a step. She’s also on record opposing the cutting of Social
> Security benefits and isn’t sold on the idea of private accounts – two
> prescriptions held by almost all Republicans and many Democrats.
>
> Then she dimpled up again and declared, gazing at the somewhat nerdy looking and
> balding Coons that he was a Marxist. Coons plaintively tried to explain that his
> self description as a “bearded Marxist”, made many years ago in a student paper
> had been a joke, allowing the national audience to reflect that maybe
> O’Donnell’s high school cavortings as a witch should be forgiven as somewhat of
> a joke too.
>
> O’Donnell offered some definitions of Marxism worthy of Reagan:
>
> "My opponent has recently said that it was studying under a Marxist professor
> that made him become a Democrat. So when you look at his position on things like
> raising taxes, which is one of the tenets of Marxism; not supporting eliminating
> death tax, which is a tenet of Marxism - I would argue that there are more
> people who support my Catholic faith than his Marxist beliefs"
>
> Coons tried to come back with the declaration that he's never been anything but
> a "clean-shaven capitalist" but O’Donnell took the round. The Forbes website,
> reporting this exchange, added helpfully, “In its simplest terms, Marxism
> philosophy is based on the idea that class struggle drives history and that
> capitalism will be replaced by socialism and eventually a classless society that
> governs itself.”
>
> There’s no point in trying to evoke substance in the O’Donnell-Coons debate.
> Almost everything said was a rich mulch of distortion or absurdity, but it was
> clear that O’Donnell is actually smarter and quicker on her feet than the patron
> saint of the Tea Partiers, and booster of O’Donnell, Sarah Palin. (Again, a low
> bar.) She’s shown Republicans in Delaware that they can vote for her without
> undue embarrassment, which is maybe why Pat Buchanan, assessing the debate,
> wagged his head dolefully and said Christine had been hobbled by milquetoast
> Republican advisors, like Randy Scheunemann.
>
> Alas for Christine, even as she was trying to winch herself off the shoals of
> national ridicule, the University of Indiana released some of the results of a
> huge new survey of America’s sex habits. O’Donnell’s strictures on masturbation
> as wrong (because it’s an expression of lust largely conducted outside the
> passionate physical conjunction of married partners of differing gender) are, as
> amusingly discussed by JoAnn Wypijewski in a recent Nation piece, out of step
> with national preferences.
>
> Culled from detailed responses from 5,865 Americans between the ages of 14 and
> 94 the university surveyors disclose in the October issue of the The Journal of
> Sexual Medicine that among people 70 or older 80 percent of men and 58 percent
> of women have masturbated solo over a lifetime. Among people aged 25 to 29,
> rates peak at 94 percent among men and 84 percent among women. Worse news yet
> for Christine: Masturbating with a partner is becoming increasingly popular.
>
> So the question is not whether the American people deserve Christine; it’s
> whether Christine, deserves this nation of wankers.
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10152010.html
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