Swine United Against Human Life

The White House, battered into submission, has signalled (surprise! surprise!) that it might be willing to capitulate to the murderous, avaricious swine (some people call them "Republicans") who want to thwart life, thwart liberty, obliterate happiness, and most particularly, insure that everyone who isn't a bloated, cannibalistic plutocrat dies in the street for want of health care. Three cheers for the vicious, sociopathic monsters. It looks as though they'll get their way again. Of course, they always do.

There Are Others Too Vicious to Live Among Piranhas

And those are the ones who always run the show.

(with an admiring h/t to the great poet, James Kavanaugh)

Nefarious Mystery Reformatters at Large

Weird. Or nefarious. Or just normal, given the Heisenbergian indeterminacy of the behavior of internet software.

Howsoever... I just looked at this blog, which appears to command the attention of about 3.2 people galaxy-wide -- which is fine with me; I just like to talk to myself :) -- and one of the posts (the one entitled, "I mostly avoid politics"), was displaying as inexplicably reformatted in the fourth paragraph, so that the right justification (actually, I can find *nothing* to justify "the right," which makes it all the more spooky... ooooooh) was disrupted, and lines displayed containing only a word or two, followed by full lines, etc. It certainly hadn't been that way before.

Anyway, just for the consumption of my practically non-existent readership, if anything shows up that's inconsistent with my usual pattern of posting (abstruse, esoteric, gratuitously prolix, theologically Christian/Quaker and politically ultra-progressive, it might not be mine, but might be the interjections of evil web gremlins! :)). I've changed my password, but who knows what evil lurks in the interstices of the internet? Probably not The Shadow, but it could always be Lamont Cranston or somebody attempting to generate pop-up ads for unaccredited universities. :)

"I never would."

The bottom line of all bottom lines. See Doctor Who, Series 4 (with David Tennant and Catherine Tate), disc 3, episode: The Doctor's Daughter.

Get Rich! Huge Profits! Money! Britney Spears!

...are all topics that have nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Hits have been lagging, however, averaging something on the order of -1 per day (I think there may actually have been discovered a counterpart to antimatter known as "antipeople," blog hits from whom cause one's counter to be decremented), but anyway, I thought I would invoke these magickal talismanic words, seemingly the subjects of greatest interest to web surfers everywhere, just to see what would happen.

To justify the title, though, let me mention that you will not get rich, that you have no prospect of making any sort of profits (except by means of the venerable American tradition of raping the poor and/or perpetrating defalcation, but then, if you had the iniquitous inclination and found yourself in the position to engage in either of the aforesaid practices, you wouldn't be reading this blog), that "Money" (with or without caps) no longer exists, and finally, that your chances of meeting Britney Spears are roughly the same as your actuarial prospects of being killed by a falling toilet seat from a disintegrating Soviet space station (though it happened to George, so hope springs eternal).

What, then, is the real topic of this post? Sorry, I forgot.

I Mostly Avoid Politics, but...

I'd take it as axiomatic -- and if it weren't, the tsunami of empirical evidence would demolish all possible doubt -- that any position taken by "the previous administration" was not just evil, but so profoundly and Satanically evil as to beggar both the imaginations and the souls of most humans on the face of the Earth. And I'm not even sure that this captures the systematicity of the malignancy, or that it's expressible in human language, but it is the best I can do for the moment, and so I'll leave it at that... except to say that if anyone wanted to create Heaven on Earth, the very best approach I can imagine would be energetically to advance the diametrical antithesis of every single policy advocated and practiced by the demons who possessed us from 2001-2008.

It is in that context, even giving due deference to the hoary dictum that "politics is the art of the possible," and due acknowledgment to the virtual certainty that Obama would not now be our president had he not always profoundly understood that dictum, and even allowing for the ineluctable exigencies of some measure of pragmatism, I have to say that I am profoundly disappointed by Obama's ostensibly pragmatism- and bipartisanship-motivated execution of what looks like Voldebush redux in any number of domains. Most particularly, though, in his positions on Iraq and on the DOMA.

As for B&C's Excellent Adventure in insanely misdirected war-mongering, there is no excuse for one more American to die in that hideous debacle (nor, I readily concede, for one more Iraqi to die, but the latter is probably entirely beyond our control, even in principle, and the former is not). And as for DOMA, it's an act that is sick, hateful and exists for no other purpose than to make millions of Americans suffer, so that others can indulge their Schadenfreude. The first responsibility of an American president is to preserve and protect (and improve) American lives, liberty and happiness. Both of the aforementioned policy positions, looking almost indistinguishable (even if perhaps not in motivation) from those of the Voldebushies, flagrantly violate this fundamental geas.

And then there's the little matter of healthcare. Well, Obama's concern that some should actually exist is an immeasurable improvement over the "die and decrease the surplus population" ukase directed at all non-plutocrats by the preceding administration, but other than that, the best that can be said is that it's woefully insufficient. There is no moral excuse, no humane excuse, no constitutional excuse -- and since this blog has a theological bent, no Christian excuse -- for us not to have a single payer system as of yesterday. People are dying because we don't. That doesn't sound to me much like a "right to life" in the legitimate and original meaning of those words as enunciated by Jefferson, let alone "liberty" (to choose under which bridge to die?), or the "pursuit of happiness."

Don't get me wrong. I admire Obama almost beyond expression, and I think we are blessed by God to have such a person as a replacement for Voldebush. And he's caught in a web of cataclysms not of his own making. But, for the taste of this one Christian, at least, thinking of the Sermon on the Mount, he is simply not doing enough, and not doing enough of the right things, and none of it fast enough. Now, I well know that, in the cosmic scheme of things, the President of the United States is probably about the 5,000th most powerful person in the country, if even that, but he does have the nominal office, and he does have the bully pulpit, and he does have the obligation to make good on his promises. Now.

Babbling Brooks

Just finished reading the latest pathogenic fulminations of David Brooks, the famed pseudo-liberal (pseudo-moderate, and pseudo-human) "Master of the Editorial Universe," who is, for reasons known only to the Satanic monsters at whose pleasure he serves, allowed and encouraged to vomit forth his sick, atrabilious sarcasm on the opinion page of the NYT with regularity sufficient to sicken half the hemisphere. Brooks seethes in indignation on behalf of the most wretched and oppressed people on all the Earth: multibillionnaire CEO's -- comparing their plight to that of France under Nazi Germany, or to the victims of Stalinist pogroms. Imagine the gall of President Obama, seeking to induce them to part with a few pennies to help 270 million acutely suffering Americans who *don't* own fleets of 200-foot yachts. What could such pathetic peons, oblivious to their feudal obligations to "die and decrease the surplus population," possibly be worth? Not so much as the fingernail clipping of a corporate CEO. It is to them (the afflicted super-rich) that Brooks' non-existent heart goes out. Oh, for their potentially lost toenail clippings! The horror of it! The inhumanity! Half of America dying for want of health care is nothing by contrast with their grievous suffering, brought on via draconian methods (political persuasion) that Brooks compares unfavorably to waterboarding.

The sick, indefatigable snottiness of his snark-ridden prose (rivalling the mucosal production of all the sinuses on earth) is almost impossible to read without experiencing apoplexy followed by projectile regurgitation. So excuse my absence. (I have to go and empty my stomach.) Back soon with another post.