Middle Class Part 18: Elephant Eats the Prophets

This will be my longest post to date and as I am fairly certain that I have virtually no readers and the indulgence in continuing with this topic is all mine. I figure I should include what I have a mind to, and be even less concerned with the length of each offering, to the extent that I ever actually was.

Below: I’m continuing my look inside the other viewpoints, this time with an eye on what democrats and republicans have written to advance the discussion. I am looking to dismiss the types and number of criticisms they have leveled at each other in order to show that they aren’t providing any solutions. In this country, that is exactly what we need, not more liberal or conservative politicians and pundits contributing nothing to the political impasse but more hoopla, divisiveness, and racket.

Profits and Prophets: The title of this column stems from a children’s book my wife favored as a youth and which now finds a place on the bookshelves of our home and is read from periodically to our two toddlers. The book’s title is actually: “Elephant Eats the Profits.” I thought it a fit title to precede the material that follows for a couple of reasons. The politicians and pundits who have written books on the subjects of politics and government are much better at specializing in revisionism than they are at forecasting. They have seemed to pontificate on what domestic or foreign policy nightmare their rival political party has engaged in rather than to offer a successful strategy they would promote. So, they make better historians than they do prophets. Also, given that the thesis of this entire blog topic has been to keep the middle class’ future economic situation in mind, as it concerns excessive taxation and the rising prices on plenty of necessary costs, among other things, the pundits and politicians who have written books casting more than aspersions on their enemy’s political intentions and actions while completely excusing their own, which are just as loathsome . . . I thought it a fit title. The democrats and republicans seem to be colluding to reap the financial benefits at the peril of the middle class- they are consuming the profits earned by middle class laborers, through their bickering about free-trade agreements, immigration policies, and health care reform.

Room for the elephant: Meanwhile, the elephant in the room, (the thing that is impossible to overlook) is that the politicians refuse to speak of the psychological and financial drain of this reality. In place of issue debate about social security going away, and economic stimulus packages we talk about who has lied the least about their voting record and whether a woman or a black man is popular enough to win a general election. Honesty is lacking and seems only capable of being an element of an election if a third candidate is admitted to the race. Not to be overlooked, an elephant is the symbol of the republican party, the party of the sitting president, who is the current chief of state oracle, who proposed to be a uniting force in the white house, that would bring both sides to compromise on major policy issues, that probably didn’t see this much failure in both domestic and foreign policy areas when he took office more than seven years ago.
(http://www.ansp.org/museum/digital_collections/elephant/nast.php)- see this link for the interesting history of the origination of the elephant as the symbol of the republican party, which the “prophets” I refer to below probably know well.

To sum up the entire previous paragraph, Steven Wright, classic understated comedian: “I’m a peripheral visionary; I can see into the future, but only off to the sides of my face.” These people are not visionaries. Unfortunately, the book writers below are also not expressing themselves in the periphery.

This quotation, from Edmund Burke is to be found among the pages of Rush Limbaugh’s book- “See, I told You So”: “Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; . . . It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Limbaugh doesn’t know it, but what is actually true is that only a conservative is capable of finding liberty in the fetters of oppression (liberty’s exact opposite). Neither the democrats nor the republicans are capable of recognizing the oppressive nature of their own political platforms; they are two wayward travelers who attend the county fair who didn’t consult the reflective properties of a mirror prior to subjecting their fellow fair-goers with their hideous appearance. Something I am constantly amazed by is despite the fact that we all speak the same language, using many of the same words, we are so out of touch with each other as Americans. Course, I was just kidding about that same language thing, politicians want to pass laws that make principals and teachers in American schools learn Spanish to assist in the assimilation of Latino and Mexican parents and students into the ways of American life. What about them having to learn English in order to properly assimilate? Politicians use all kinds of words like- “I will not raise taxes,” or “we are interested in spending money on education” which have come to have all sorts of connotations and antonym-like meanings which the average U.S. citizen couldn’t possibly come to fathom.

Ann Coulter, Emissary of god (presiding): Hadn’t read one word this Echo Narcissist has ever written . . . until I felt obligated because of the subject matter of this post. I’m acquainted enough with her level of Echo Narcissism that I spent only forty minutes perusing one of her books. Some of the titles of Coulter’s books- “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism;” (368 pages) “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter;” (353 pages) and “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” (529 pages); “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right;” (256 pages). That is over 1500 pages of partisan crap; by the time I’m done, I may have 150 pages of objective material nailing both sides, with much more of an action plan. She is, however, the female version of the anti-christ; a llama, who is tired of being considered a poor man’s camel, and whose worst fear is that of obtaining food poisoning from an undercooked meatball at a VFW meeting hall is more emotionally stable.

Take the title of the book of Coulter’s I checked out of the library as my case study of her work- “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” from 2006. In it, she reviles the democrats for their lack of religion, and reviles them more for their adherence to the supposed religion of liberalism, which she does an adequate job of denigrating, often enough with humor. Case in point- “Throughout the 2oo4 campaign, the Democrats were looking for a Democrat who believed in God—a pursuit similar to a woman searching for a boyfriend in a room full of choreographers.” (pg. 19) I see only two things wrong with the above statement- 1) she capitalized the word democrat; 2) she capitalized the word god.

Her title for chapter 2 is “The Passion of the Liberal: Thou Shalt not Punish the Perp.” Funny and true. Liberals have a soft spot for criminals and take the hard line on Americans who obey the law. Being governed by a liberal is like working under the “protection” of a union. They reward those who steal from a grocery store with multiple chances of being a better employee, and punish those who are five minutes late to work twice a year.

Thing is, though I can appreciate much of what she writes and even the way in which it is written, she is a she-bitch. Her style is dripping with sarcasm and vindictiveness and lined with truth. Problem is she is pathologically aggressively a wittier version of Limbaugh, maliciously insecure, and despises a liberal for their weakness. A conservative simply has different weaknesses, not necessarily fewer, or more, than a liberal. See, conservatives and liberals can suck in one very profound way- consider they are sit-coms that air on the same night and are televised during the same hour, for the same duration. Seeing as there are few things worth watching on network television these days- consider that both shows suck at the same time.

Coulter mentions that democrats break all of the commandments one by one; but I wonder how that is different from a conservative who breaks them all at once. I don’t know how after reading about twenty pages and skimming passages of others, she would feel qualified to pass judgment on a set of people (liberals) who do not believe in an entity (god) that has never been proven to exist. I understand that her approach is just a conceit in order to pontificate against them morally, but if god did exist, the first thing he would probably do is to tell Ann Coulter to get off his side.

I get the impression that the republicans are looking forward to January 2009 with relish- Bush will be out of office and they will not have to defend him anymore. Bush is like a younger brother with cerebral palsy and all the other siblings are tired of wiping the drool from his bottom lip.

One more thing on Miss Coulter- I’ve read enough psychology to contend that a belief in a god is a biological and psychological compulsion. I would write that I could win that argument with half my brain tied behind my back- see my Limbaugh paragraphs below, but I am a bit more humble than that. Proving god does or does not exist is impossible.

Al Franken, former comedian: I skimmed Franken’s last book- “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them- A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” (377 pages) This is a liberal yarn that is anything but fair and balanced. Some of the chapter titles- “Ann Coulter: Nutcase,” “I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg,” “Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully,” and “Vast Legions of Pig Feces: The Bush Environmental Record.” If Franken’s material is fair and balanced, then pop music radio stations play variety, even those that say they play variety. Radio stations think they play variety when they alter the order in which the same ten songs are played. Yeah, I’m looking at the llama who is scratching into the sand that she plans to give the next 100 meatballs a physical before she consumes them. Llamas aren’t carnivores you say . . . yeah, well if Franken can maintain he’s being fair and balanced, a llama can eat a highly processed meat product conjoined back together, drowning in sauce, asking it to turn to the side and cough . . . hey, it’s a meatBALL. Franken, despite the fact that he was a writer for Saturday Night Live in the early days, huh, maybe because he was a writer for SNL, would have you believe that at a Wiccan nature festival- no animals were sodomized by the warlocks presiding.

Franken thinks that he can disarm the truth with humor. I would like to disarm Franken for being the guy who was the first to put television advertisements for his candidacy on the air this election season. He is running for the MN senate seat, opposing Norm Coleman. Huh, and I could have waited until at least March before I decided I wasn’t going to vote for you. Too bad the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation didn’t have a stipulation restricting when the politicians could start putting campaign ads on television. Clearly, these advertisements are taking the slots that, given the writers strike, would have been taken by commercials for reality shows. So, we lose either way.

Fair and balanced? Right, and a tree-frog could make a living quoting Harpo Marx. Psst- Harpo was the silent one.


Bill O’Reilly, interrupt-us: I had also never read one word he’s written prior to my fact-finding tour through the political pundit tome landscape. I have watched his show a couple of times. O’Reilly interrupts people with more frequency than an impatient sow who is trying to get impregnated by the bighorn sheep in her life whom she knows has attention deficit disorder, but who has no idea when she is ovulating. O’Reilly interrupts people while they are agreeing with him. He must have a 5 second bellowing rule- within which interval he must speak. Usually this rule is restricted to food that has spilled on the floor and one’s ability to justify eating the potentially tainted chow.

Mr. Bill, a character also well-known to SNL enthusiasts, and for all I know was brought into being by Franken, must interject more often than a blue whale with a priapism. Try keeping a blue whale, the mammal with the largest primary sexual organ on the planet, from ahem . . . interjecting, would be well nigh impossible. Hell, I think O’Reilly would find a way to interrupt me should I attempt to read one of his books. I didn’t believe this myself, and wrote the previous sentence before opening his book “Who’s Looking Out for You?” (2003, 212 pages) but this text appears on page 3: “Trust-fund babies and corporate weasels are not allowed to read this book. If you try, I will find out and come to your house . . . I will seize your copy of the book and mock you for disobeying the rules.” Wow, and I was just kidding about being interrupted. Luckily, I am not a trust-fund baby or corporate weasel.

I needed only about ten minutes more of skimming the book before deciding on its merit. I would give it a thumbs up. He is much more contrite, self-effacing, with less of a ranting façade in print than on television, and I am shocked to contend this- but parts of what I read were . . . touching.

He appears to slam religious zealots, greedy corporate elitists and even his own disciplinarian father. I may have to cut him SOME slack, despite what I’ve written above about the fawning insistence to reward his ego with the sound of his own voice because of the material found on pages 36-38.
He lists some of the things that the federal government is good at:
Waging war, collecting taxes from individuals (not corporations), letting Jesse Jackson get away with using his nonprofit organizations for his own enrichment, keeping corruption investigations of powerful elected officials secret. He lists these things as items that the federal government is not good at: stopping illegal aliens from entering the country, investigating rich and powerful guys who make secret deals. Unfortunately, O’Reilly leans too heavily to the conservative side of the aisle despite his own opinion that he is an Independent. Of the 20 items that comprise the lists I mention above where he includes a name in the example, 7 are democrats and none are conservatives. I’m skeptical of his opinion that he puts right ahead of political ideology.

In true O’Reilly form, the title of the book I perused isn’t really a question he meant for other people to answer without his help.

Rush Limbaugh, means words: I had never read anything he’s written either- and I read a lot, but usually I read literature that will stand the test of time, not books that I could use in a pinch if I were out of toilet paper. Way back in part 1 of this topic I mentioned having listened to one of Limbaugh’s conservatively-fawning Echo Narcissistic displays of ego-centrism where he addressed the folding of toilet paper for maximum wiping volume. I’ll leave the reading of his volumes to those people, seeking to substantiate their hunches, who would vote for a candidate based on their position on abortion- in other words, to sheltered, unsophisticated individuals who spell potato the way Dan Quayle does.

I’ve listened to Rush a couple times. One time, a caller mentioned something about Rush being the best and Limbaugh said “thank you, and I know.” Limbaugh maintains that he could win an argument with half of his brain tied behind his back. If science could somehow assist me in transacting this, please let the half of his brain he would choose to divest from himself be the only half capable of sending a series of synapses to his arms, physiologically requesting them to be raised in order to protect him from me as I punch him in the yap.

Limbaugh’s first yarn- “The Way Things Ought to be,” sounds like a title an insecure bloviator who never got enough candy as a youth would give to a book. The book I checked out from the library to do my case study on Limbaugh was rather his second book (are you thinking what I’m thinking? “There are two?”) is called “See, I Told You So.” (copyright 1993) Limbaugh isn’t nearly as clever as Coulter, while being just as annoying. The last page of his introduction is comprised of quotations from famous writers- from Thomas Paine, Samuel Butler and Henry David Thoreau. The first quotation is Voltaire’s: “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” I believe that Limbaugh is forward and delusional enough to contend that this quote would apply to the nature of his bombast. Using Voltaire, one of the most clever writers of all time, to introduce the hooey that follows is like asking Richard Pryor to introduce the comedy of an orangatan whose best act is its ability to throw feces accurately.

Limbaugh alludes to another writer worth reading to introduce the contents of chapter 18- “Political Correctness and the Coming of the Thought Police.” As with Coulter, I can appreciate and agree with the sentiment, as the contents of the chapter touch upon a liberal’s protective nature of all things weak. I’m sure Limbaugh is referencing George Orwell’s creation of “Big Brother” from his novel- “1984.” I would remind Rush that his president (Bush) wanted to enact wire-tapping legislation making it legal to listen to a citizen’s phone wires. Ok, not legislation per say; Bush just wanted to have it done, which is mindful of the Nike shoe company’s slogan in the 90s- “Just Do It!” That’s who conservatives should be quoting- shoe companies, not cannon authors of some of the best literature in the world. If Thoreau could be made posthumously aware that Rush Limbaugh were quoting from him, he’d drown what’s left of his transcendental spirit in Walden Pond.

To cut Limbaugh some slack- he does have some historical perspective. He writes about the Native-Americans- the “truth” and not about the overly romanticized 1620s Plymouth landing version in an engaging way. Just skimming it, there seemed to be some historical references, some things I didn’t know, but there are a lot of things I don’t know, even such things as the definitions to certain words.

One of Limbaugh’s chapter titles is “Words Mean Things.” He chastizes Bill Clinton for a speech he made in 1992 while campaigning against Bush Sr., stating that he would bail out the oppressed Haitians should they be delivered upon the shore of the United States. This is called pandering. He was right to cite Clinton for this idiotic Haitian indulgence, as the Haitians took him at his word. But I wonder if Limbaugh would note the pandering that the very presidential, Ken-doll-Mitt Romney, who conservatives must be wetting their pants to generally elect, put forth while campaigning in Michigan. Romney made it seem like Michigan was the only state in the union and that if he were elected president, all of their cares would be attended to. That is pandering, for words mean things. Pandering, according to Limbaugh, probably only has a liberal connotation. One word that Limbaugh should look up- hypocrisy.

Rush is the type of conservative who would paint the walls of a bathroom without picking out the towels or shower curtain to match- man that sounds like a metro-sexual way to write the cliché of putting the cart before the horse. I don’t dress well enough to be considered a metro-sexual and Limbaugh doesn’t reason well enough to be so maliciously indignant. See, part of rhetoric is foresight, and Limbaugh is awful good at ignoring what ought to be regret after he has chosen a color swatch, bought paint, taped the room, stirred the paint and slapped it on the wall- finally realizing that chartreuse and corral green don’t match . Thinking ahead is not Limbaugh’s strong suit and if it were, he would need to be fitted for an XXXXXXXXL-Revisionist-suit for his ego. Rush must think that conservatives are the Aryans of the political world.

To the extent that a man’s ego, a psychological component of the human mind, can be compared to an animal’s anatomical feature- Limbaugh’s ego is one-thousand times the size of the blue whale’s unit, and ten-thousand times less potent- if you catch my meaning.

Chuck Schumer, out of touch liberal: I read about half of senior democratic New York senator Schumer’s book- “Positively American- Winning Back the Middle Class One Family at a Time.” (270 pages) Half of the book is a self-serving recounting of his past election successes which has relatively little to do with communicating how the middle class has been put upon and what he would do to solve it, as the title would seem to indicate. He unconvincingly justifies the roles of lobbyists (page 178) and convincingly reveals just how difficult it is for either side to successfully push a bill through the legislature that completely satisfies one side or the other because of the culture of compromise inherent in the legislative bodies of government (pgs. 185 & 186). The most valuable piece of information Schumer contributes to this overall discussion is that “The cost of college tuition has increased faster than inflation for twenty-six consecutive years.” (page 159) (see parts 6 and 7 where I address this) Schumer calls the republicans “economic royalists” and implies that immigration legislation had more teeth when a democrat was in the white house by citing the hundreds of cases, as recently as 1999, when Clinton was president, which brought cases against employers who hire illegally. Neither party has any teeth on immigration. They have plenty of lips that pucker to kiss the behind of the immigrant, but few teeth used to take a bite out of the problem.

He invents, for the purposes of a fictional middle class case study, a family he calls the Baileys, to whom he’s given jobs, blessed with fictional children, retirement accounts and still living parents, one of whom has had a prostate cancer scare. Any political, economic, or legislative notions he might have, he maintains that he attempts to figure on what the Baileys might think, how it might affect them. All of his solutions in the book involve reducing our involvement with or dependence on a modus operandi that he feels is detrimental to the middle class cause by 50% (ex. Reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 50%, Increase reading and math scores by 50%, Reduce tax evasion and avoidance by 50%, etc. are the names of the chapters contained in the second half of the book). I found less anxiety, frustration, and disgust with the current state of political affairs than in Nader’s or Dobbs’ books, but plenty of that is attributable to the fact that Schumer is a sitting U.S. senator and can better feign a disquieted demeanor.

Three other things struck me about Schumer’s contributions to this topic:
1) he writes- “In 2005, those who made less than $25,000 a year were twice as likely to face an audit as those who made more than $1 million, because the IRS was obsessing about abuses of the Earned Income Credit.” Rather union-like and quite akin to radioing a pilot about to crash into a mountain that he had, in the course of his plummeting, intersected the flight line of various other aircraft. Conservatives have questionable priorities. I know this because it seems apparent that all conservatives must believe that no republican politician has ever proposed to raise taxes, or been interested in pilfering money best left to the spending discretion of the middle class.

On page 55 he recounts a story of Al D’Amato, the N.Y. state senator he unseated, commenting on senator Schumer’s political courage and bravery by complimenting him on the symbolical size of Schumer’s testicles as they equate to political gaul, with D’Amato supposedly stating: “ ‘You’ve got the two biggest ones in the state.’ ” No democrat has big balls; they are too busy co-opting them to the minorities who are allowed to continue to steal our country with the help of guilt-stricken liberals everywhere.

3) Schumer seemed overly pleased with an ad striking back at D’Amato’s accusation that Schumer was not tough on crime. The content of the ad does not bear quoting as it is just like every other political advertisement anyone has ever seen and will see thousands of times before the first Tuesday in November 2008. The idea that a politician could be proud of that pablum, and found it necessary to include the full text of the ad is not surprising because it is an unfortunate indication that pride and personality trump attenuated issue debate.

Some pundit books I didn’t read:
Hugh Hewitt’s “If it’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Dems in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It”
Barbara Sinclair’s “Party Wars- Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making; the Ugly Truths We don’t Want to Know but Have to.”

Other liberal book authors: Barack Obama, Keith Olbermann, Dennis Kucinech, Bill Clinton, Alan Comes, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Bill Bradley, Bill Richardson all have written books. John Kerry and John Edwards co-wrote a book. Greaaaaaat- a book written by two white guys that probably sucks. The books I haven’t written by myself aren’t as bad as this one probably is; I would rather watch Limbaugh paint the bathroom- a room with only one john, and actually allow him to speak, than read a book written by the two Johns.

Other conservative book authors: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanen, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, John McCain have all written books. George W. learned how to open one. Bernard Goldberg wrote a book- “110 People Who are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37);” noteworthy conservatives on the cover- ??? Steve Gill wrote a book: “The Fred Factor- How Fred Thompson May Change the Face of the ’08 Campaign.” That is conservative foresight for you. Was the assignment, how the Atlanta Falcons, led by league-MVP Michael Vick, are going to win the ’08 Super Bowl already handed out?

Primary Colors: Many of these volumes are adorned in the very chic patriotic colors of red, white, and blue, boasting highly partisan titles that completely dismiss the other side. Ultra-out-of-touch conservative Echo Narcissist Jason Lewis of MN KTLK talk radio recently welcomed guest Jonah Goldberg, author of “Liberal Fascism”- any chance there was any objectivity on display during the course of that interview? Riiiiiiight- a set of Siamese octupus twins, who are cyber-terrorists with sleep apnea, have a better chance of proving they are co-heiresses of the Cocoa Wheats fortune. Everybody who is a nobody has pontificated to their heart’s content to no good effect on the topic of justifying their side in an argument against their direct opposite on the politicial ideological spectrum. But no candidate has been bold and honest enough to claim the reward that would be theirs for coming out against illegal immigration (and the republicans just debated in Florida a couple weeks ago, a state with a large immigrant population), telling baby boomers and the rest of us that social security benefits will be going away, but at least we can stop paying into it, that a candidate cannot be all things to all people but can mean something to most everyone. No, they will not be men and say, or write, such things, for they are the last of the primary colors- they are yellow.

Next time: Another group, whose subject matter is a historical look at politics or an in-depth view into campaign contributions, and contributors in a bi-partisan way, is the topic next time.