Obama Whores for Right Wing Divines

It flabbergasted this morning to read that Barack Obama has taken up whoring for the right-wing divines by announcing he will continue and expand George Bush’s so-called faith-based programs.

Those programs, in case one has been asleep for years, shovel money from the Treasury into the coffers of churches running what they call charities. The aim of this effort is to buy Catholic and evangelical votes. So much for separation of church and state.

What this unconstitutional award of taxpayer funds does, in effect, is to plump up church finances: Money that the federal funds replace Elmer Gantrys of all sorts can now use to recruit the heathens for the Lord.

Many of these church operations make sure those who need food, shelter and other sustenance don’t get any unless they say prayers, sing hymns, speak in tongues, handle rattlesnakes and otherwise profess to be believers. The Catholic groups have been noteworthy in trying to exclude homosexuals from coming on staff.

So suddenly the great liberal, Obama, who has been shunning Moslems as if their very presence might give him AIDs, announces he now leads the Panders Party, thereby joining John McCain, the great maverick who will pull his pants down for any conservative nastiness, including faith-based programs.

It will interest to see if Obama will say, sure, let the Moslems get federal bucks too for their charities (the ones not staffed entirely by FBI agents). I wouldn’t bet on that.

It will also interest to see how Obama’s new moving to the right plays out with liberal Democrats. Such still have Ralph Nader to vote for.

At this point Obama is beginning to prove himself just another do-anything-to-win politician. It may be that the only thing that gets liberals to vote for him may be their intense disgust with George Bush and fear that McCain may just a trifle worse than Obama when it comes to selling out.

But the presidential campaign has a long time to run yet. Obama’s sniffing the polls. Who knows what he might endorse next? Overturning legalized abortion? Nuking Iran? Banning gay marriages?

Maybe his campaign slogan should be: Yes We Cant. No apostrophe.

The Lubricious Embrace of Iraqi Oil Fields

Well, the Bushites have succeeded for the time being of rewarding those for whom Bush went to war in Iraq: The giant oil companies.

Our State Department, acting as broker for Exxon, Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, has strong-armed the ministers of our Iraqi client government into giving these suffering corporations no-bid contracts to exploit Iraq’s oil fields, supposed to hold the second-biggest pool of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia’s.

That means a couple of things for those who appreciate history. It means the U.S., the UK and France now have giant economic interests in Iraq. It means we all will poke around there for decades to protect the oil companies, once they spend a few bucks bribing Iraqi politicians and rearrange the Iraqi economy and government to suit themselves. Dick Cheney probably will head the oil consortium ruling Iraq. He'll go down in history as Big Dick.

The foreign policies of the U.S., the UK and France in the Middle East for nearly a century have been spelled OIL. True, we’ve garnished our selfishness in the Arab and Persian world with cant about bringing democracy to the downtrodden and so forth, but all that has no meaning than a sprig of parsley served beside a sizzling pork chop.

François Georges-Picot and Mark Sykes would snicker at the hypocrisy being offered for the Bush II war in Iraq. They were the young French and British diplomats who in 1916 at the behest of their governments took a ruler and compass to the map and penciled in most the lines still defining what a nation is in Greater Arabia and Old Persia. They left us out of fussing up the new governments, but when we sniffed oil we hustled in so that by the 1940s we had a few puppets of our own sitting on thrones while we mewed about self-governance for the downtrodden.

Bush II had a couple of other motives for going to war. First, he need a good war, to make his scratch on history. He wasn’t going to have fame otherwise. Daddy had a war called Desert Storm. Son created Desert Farce.

Second, there was a matter of revenge. Saddam Hussein had tried to bump off Bush I. Bush family honor demanded satisfaction. It's the kind of thing you swear to in Skull & Bones.

Last, knocking off Saddam gave the Israelis pols orgasms. Now they'd like El Stupido to do them another favor before he stumbles out of office in six months: Invade Iran.

Lots of oil there too. Good war might elect McBush and save the Republican party from the oblivion it deserves.

Stay tuned. The oil boys are thinking, plotting, scheming, manipulating. They got themselves a president and they might as well squeeze all they can out of him before he joins U.S. Grant as an exemplar of ethical leadership.

Bring Back That Old-Time Religion

It warms the soul to read laments about the our nation’s wickedness for abandoning the “traditional Christian values, in which this country was founded upon,” to quote a recent letter to my local daily, which prints every signed missive that arrives and that a phone call might verify.

One traditional 18th Century Christian value was slavery. Through silence the Constitution ratified by the 13 states not only sanctioned slavery but also, for apportioning taxes and congressional representation, graciously counted each slave as three-fifths of a human. This was not just a sop for the South but also for parts of the North, where many such 60-percent persons toiled in bondage.

In the slave colonies fervent divines of most Christian stripes (but not Quaker) preached that God had willed some people to be slaves and others to be slave owners and both should be thankful for it.

The nation’s largest Protestant domination, the Southern Baptists, did not formally give up finding Biblical justification for slavery until 1995.

(They still find Biblical justification for subjugating wives to husbands. It’s no wonder they oppose homosexual marriages, for in those jointures which partner would subjugate the other?)

Indeed, another founding traditional Christian value denied women the right to vote or hold legislative or other high office and in many jurisdictions the right to own property in their own names. Today’s semi-emancipation of women has helped lead us to where we are, ethically speaking.

Yet another 18th Century value was forcing children, often as young as five, to labor in coal and other mines, in factories, on farms, and as indentured servants leased out to strangers, for five and ten-year terms.

When the nation formed, few religious took umbrage at hanging six and seven year olds for picking pockets or stealing bread or at giving them a good skin-stripping flogging before tossing them into prisons to amuse sexually deprived adult felons.

No doubt the reinstitution of all these spiritually salubrious practices would improve our country’s morals.

Certainly Republican candidates and office holders see that. They call frequently for larding the federal and state judiciaries with judges who will uphold the morals of the Founding Fathers (not of no-account Founding Mothers, of course): Slavery, child labor, female bondage and like virtues.

Eight will get you five, when the Republican convention opens, before 15 minutes is up, the keynote speaker will be pounding the podium about the values of the nation in 1787 and how we must go back them; and across the land the heads of the millions of constitutional experts who people this country (most have never read the Constitution and therefore keep a pure mind about it) will bob up and down in agreement before their TV sets.

Bring back the past. Make it our future.

Bush a Felonious Clunk, McClellen Reports

It surprises not that archeologists now think Stonehenge marks a burial ground for cremated notables of three millennia ago.
The place the only time I viewed it reminded me of several marble orchards I had visited here and there on the West Coast save, perhaps, for a handful of shabbily dressed middle-aged white folks performing incensed Druid rituals in and among the sightseers enduring the rain and wind that sweep Stonehenge.
The archeologists say they’ve figured out the place was used by worthies with clout because a few objects signifying power have shown up in the holes containing ashes, bone remnants, teeth.
George W. Bush intends to be buried there, not cremated but whole, clutching a symbol of his presidential days, a copy of Mad Magazine.
This news about Stonehenge broke along with reports of White House counterattacks upon the sanity and sense of Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary, whose new book reports that Dr. Goebbels could have profited by taking propaganda lessons from the President, VP Cheney, Carl Rove and other liars.
McClellan offers such tidbits as that Bush told a friend that the parties he used to attend were so wild he couldn’t remember whether he had snorted cocaine and that Bush admitted in private that he had authorized leaking the name of Valerie Wilson, an undercover CIA agent, to the press, as a way of getting back her husband.
Such leaking is a felony under federal law. No one took a direct fall for the leak. But Bush and Cheney generously let I. Lewis Libby Jr., Cheney’s right hand, go to prison for lying to FBI agents and a grand jury investigating the crime. Betting’s strong that Bush will pardon Libby, the good soldier but bad liar, before Bush leaves the White House next January.
Naturally these worthies and their flunkies now attack McClellan as a nut case for speaking of these family matters best left unvoiced, at least in polite Republican circles, where rich white folks dream up ways for poor whites, blacks, asiatics and hispanics to get themselves killed in Army uniforms.
They dare not attack McClellan, of course, of having been looney when he fronted for Bush, Cheney and Rove before the whining White House press corps. That would imply that Bush et. al. were lunatics too. So they do the obvious: Go tch-tch that McClellan’s lost his way and is lying about them now to make a few bucks, or worse, to get belly rubs from liberal elitist New York book editors.
Oh, the horror of it! The truth, that is.

New Air Screwum Fares and Fees Announced

Air Screwum today announced new fares and fees for its nationwide services-- prices bound, its officials said, to be copied by the rest of the nation’s domestic airlines.
“We learned from the oil companies that the best way to make money in the airline business is to conspire,” said Jocko Jacks, founder, president, CEO, CFO and CUB (Chief Union Buster) of Air Screwum.
“And the easiest way for airlines to do that, without talking about it other than at cocktail parties, is to rotate being first to raise fares and fees, thus avoiding the possibility of federal price-fixing indictments. Of course so long a Republican sits in the White House there’s no chance of that happening anyway, but it’s better to keep up the practice than lose your skills.”
Jacks said the only way to view the new Air Screwum fares is to go to Screwum.com, where daily fare changes post each morning beginning at 6 a.m. EST.
“Mainly, thanks to the excuse of rising oil prices, we intend to double our fares by the end of summer.”
He also had flunkies at the press conference handout a sheet of new boarding and onboard fees for all tourist-class passengers:
–To check one bag: $50.
–To check on bag with a bomb: $500.
–Each carry-on bag (no bigger than a shaving kit under new rules): $25.
–Each use of flight attendant to cram a carry-on bag into a space too small: $25.
–Each seat with leg room: $50.
–Each aisle seat: $50, no matter with leg room or not.
–Each seat without a fat person sitting next to it: $100.
–Each use of a toilet: $10.
–Each pee in a toilet: $5.
–Each crap in a toilet: $10.
–Each sheet of toilet paper: $1.
–Each use of soap: $1.
–Each towel: $1.
–Each fart, whether in toilet or in seat, as measured by computerized Fart-O-Meters: $2.
–Each cup of water: $5.
–Each cup of coffee: $7.
–Each peanut (individually packaged): $1.
–Each 100-calorie meal: $10.
–Each heart attack: $1,000.
–Each resuscitation by electric shocker : $5,000 (paid in advance by cash or credit card).
–Each resuscitation by mouth-to-mouth: $10,000, in advance.
–Each hijacking: $1 million, paid before boarding, cash only, Euros only or Saudi oil futures.
–Each last will and testament: $10,000 if on standard flight-deck forms.
–Each in-flight prayer: $50, if Christian; $1 million if Moslem or other.
–Each drink of hard liquor: (Please ask attendants for daily price, minimum $15).
“There are other fees we’ve had to raise to keep ourselves solvent and to keep fuel tanks full enough to get each flight to an airport, even if it’s not the one you want,” Jacks said.
He said there will no cost for sitting for hours on a delayed flight. “We looked at that,” he said, “but couldn’t come up with a good figure for each breath of stale air. We will be charging in the future, though, for each rage by passengers crazed by claustrophobia, high temperatures, lack of air, water and toilets.”
“People make a lot out of little things,” Jack said, “an each attendant they beat up costs us money. So we’re going to have to charge for that.”
Air Screwum’s stock price advanced 40 percent today on Wall Street upon Jacks’ announcement.

McBush Masters Reading the Tea Leaves

John McBush McCain with a prescience unknown in the histories of statesmanship predicts the U.S. war in Iraq will end with victory in 2013–implicity, at the beginning of his second term as president, after a first term impressing the Iraqi rebels with how tough he is and by extension how tough the U.S. Army can become.

McBush’s reading of the of the bottom of his cup of Orange Pekoe refreshes. Most actual or would-be leaders–witness the man McBush wishes to become–predict wars, at their beginnings, to be over in a few days or months, with their side victorious. All of the leading brains of Europe knew in August 1914 the little spat between the Austrians and Germans and the Serbs, French and English and Russians would see the their troops staging victory parades just as Santa Claus or Father Christmas made his next appearance.

But McBush fought his war in Vietnam, where it took the Vietnamese six years to kick our asses out of their country. On no evidence whatever except the successful stubbornness of several of the sides in the Iraqi religious civil war, McBush hunches that this little dustup ruining his nation’s military forces and treasury and currency and economy may last a little longer–four more years than our defeat in Vietnam.

So far none of the press I’ve read has bothered to see what other sages say about McBush’s reading of the omens. After all, he is either a soothsayer or a fool and either eminently prepares him to lead this great nation where 70 percent of the population routinely report to strangers polling on the phone that they expect Satan to tapdance on the street corners and pitchfork passing souls into the eternal fires.

John McBush Genuflects for the Votes of Monarchists

Sen. John (McBush) McCain spent May 13 near Seattle meeting with a group of superannuated local Republicans who still mumble lip service to the environment, though in practice for the past 20 years their efforts for the environment have chiefly been silence and sometimes error and even deliberate attack.

The session was closed to the public, for reasons neither major Seattle paper nor Associated Press made clear.

When reporters did question McCain none apparently managed to ask him why environmental organizations rank McCain’s efforts for the environment well below 40 percent.

Nor apparently did anyone weasel in a query about McCain’s recent harangue about “activist judges,” a Republican and otherwise reactionary cliche about judges who render opinions based on law that run afoul of conservative dogmas–such as, for instance, saying prisoners held by the U.S. must be afforded the Constitutional privilege of being able to have lawyers and be able to question witnesses. Oh, the horror of it! Especially since 60 percent of federal judges now sitting are Republicans, appointed by such Marxists as Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and George Bush II.

McBush made his pro-forma howl about federal judges to ear-suck votes from the many monarchists of the right who slaver to give the President, provided he’s Republican, the powers of Roman emperor. (What they will do when a Democratic president claims the same powers I dare not think: Fall on their martini glasses probably.)

Even when McBush made his announcement, no reporters then bothered to ask McBush whether he would appoint another Catholic to the Supreme Court, where five Catholics–Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas-- now make up the conservative majority and usually strain the law through eyes of good Catholic boys who memorized their catechisms and think the present mob of self-annoited eunuchs in the Vatican can have nothing but the purest thoughts.

McBush so far has enjoyed a pleasant life with the pressies who follow him around, chiefly, by all accounts, because he likes to sit down with reporters to B.S. and have a snort, two things reporters love because it (A) makes them feel important, (B) may provide a news story with a new lead and (C) because in good conscience they may put the booze on their expense accounts.

Unfortunately, all that denies the rest of us a chance to see what McBush says when he has to answer an intelligent, hard-ass question and so reveal the qualities of mind and character he wants to elevate into the Oval Office, where he can snooze away his latter years, interrupted only when the Vice President comes by daily to take his pulse and blood pressure.