Sam Smith: How To Outflank The Tea Party (And Barack Obama)

"...we are faced with a politics reduced to two Mafia mobs, between which we will be asked to choose in 2012."

Sam Smith writes at the Progressive Review:
Pablo Davis in Memphis sent me a quote from the Argentinian essayist Arturo Jauretche that got me thinking about the key question of the day in a different sort of way.

That question, if you haven’t noticed, is this: what the hell do we do now?

The quote from Jauretche was: “The technique of our enemies is to demoralize and depress the people. Demoralized people don’t triumph and that’s was we come here today to battle joyfully. Nothing great can be accomplished from sadness. “

One of the reasons the right is doing so much better than the left these days is that the right has passion, while the left mostly has logic.

The problem with logic is that it easily ignores the passionate and the joyful. In its name, we trivialize the trivial, discounting the importance of the little things that keep people going in bad times.

The journalist Russell Baker understood this, writing once that, “Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard ... Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class ... Adults, on the whole, are solemn ... Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious.”

I understood this from an early age because my introduction to politics was not ideological or logical but as an eleven year old stuffing envelopes in a campaign that ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. I had never seen anything quite as much fun and exciting as a political campaign office.

Many years later, I would write, “We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers. Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation." ...>more

Miss Piggy Pitches A Fit On "Fox & Friends"

AFL-CIO Honcho Calls Teabaggers "Sons Of Bitches"; Champion Purveyors Of Violent Rhetoric Whine, Stomp Little Feet; Hilarity Ensues

So, just to recap... Jimmy Hoffa Jr. delivers a typically Hoffaesque speech in which he rips the Teabaggers a new one and calls for voters to "take out the sons of bitches", followed by the Teabaggers -- who frequently show up at rallies armed and whose candidates for the House and Senate talk about "Second Amendment solutions" -- getting all butthurt about coarse, violent rhetoric. What a bunch of pussies. Here's Miss Piggy on Fox & Friends getting her little panties in a twist while interviewing Donkeycratic Party Chair "Little Debbie" Wasserman Schultz:



Now, mind you, we here at the offices of the TW aren't exactly fans of the tepid corporate centrists which comprise the Donkeycratic Party, and yet we found ourselves cheering just a bit as we watched Little Debbie flicking off Miss Piggy in what had to be the most awesome catfight we'd ever seen on the screen since the legendary stripper catfight in 1962's The Brain That Wouldn't Die, shown here for comparison:



Meeeooowwwww.

Quitty McQuitter Quits Again

Reported Bailing on Iowa Teabagger Event

Danny Yadron reports at the Wall Street Journal:
Sarah Palin’s Saturday appearance at a tea party rally in Indianola, Iowa, is on hold, a person close to the former Alaska governor told The Wall Street Journal.

The person said Ms. Palin’s appearance was “no longer confirmed” and cited “continual lying” from event organizers at Tea Party of America, including a recent mixup over whether former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware would also speak.

Ms. Palin is known for last-minute schedule changes that whipsaw supporters and media across the country. But the latest decision is puzzling. Ms. Palin’s speech at the rally was viewed as her most high-profile appearance of the summer, fueling speculation she was indeed plotting to run for the Republican presidential nomination... >more

Frantz Kebreau: We Tried To Tell You, Man!

Black Conservative who spoke at Philly "Uni-Tea" Party rally leaves group; cites white supremacist connections

Daryle Lamont Jenkins writes at One People's Project:

Truth is truth no matter how much someone tries to spin it, and when it comes to the racial antagonism teabaggers pretend they are not about, the truth will keep coming at them until it takes them out. The number of times we have caught the teabagging crowd cavorting with neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists makes them look sillier and sillier when they deny it is going on. But one thing that we knew was going to happen sooner or later was a black conservative having enough of it. That happened today, with a guy we came across at the "See? We're not racist" event in Philly last year called the Uni-TEA rally. Frantz Kebreau (pictured) was the National Director of the so-called National Association for the Advancement of Conservative People of All Colors, but he had since stepped down, and his replacement James C. Marshall reached out to conservative people who were only interested in one color - and it was most certainly not black. That upset Kebreau something awful, and after giving the group the chance to correct this, decided to cut his ties. Now the NAACPC is one of those right-wing groups that like to pretend conservatives are not racist by touting all the pro-black things the Republican Party 100 years ago. Needless to say, that crap never works because we are talking about what conservatives are doing and what they are doing now. Mr. Kebreau, last year we reached out to you about the scumbags in your camp that do this, but like most of the folks in it we just assumed that you were more interested in being a conservative than being a human being for you to care. We hope this means we're wrong... >more

Bachmann Staffer's Ties To Uganda's "Kill Gays" Bill

Igor Volsky reports at ThinkProgress:
Jim Burroway has a good post exploring the troubling connection between GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and Peter E. Waldron, a campaign staffer “responsible for her faith-based organizing both in Iowa and South Carolina.” Yesterday, the Atlantic reported on Waldron’s “arrest in Uganda in 2006 on charges of running illegal guns and ammunition,” but Borroway explores his deeper ties to the country’s infamous “kill gays” legislation and radical Christian theology... >more

Charles Dyer: Teabagger, Oath Keeper, Fugitive

Daryle Lamont Jenkins reports at One People's Project:

In January 2010, we reported on Former Marine Sgt., teabagger favorite and then-Oathkeeper member Charles Allan Dyer, who is better known among the right-wing looney bin as "July4Patriot" on YouTube, as he was being picked up on charges that he stole a grenade launcher from an Army base and raped an underaged member of his family. Well when you're dealing with this crowd of idiots everything is conspiracy and nothing that you see is real, even the stuff that is. So to that end, the pseudo-patriots rallied around him enmasse, and voila, charges started to fall by the wayside, namely the grenade launcher charge and we still don't know how he pulled that off. The child-rape charge stuck, however, but in April the case ended up in a mistrial. The retrial was today. But wait! There's more! It seems that his trailer home was burned to the ground on Friday and his girlfriend is now sitting in jail on possible arson charges. But wait! There's MORE! Charles Dyer's stuff - including all his firearms were not in the home during the fire! No doubt, the looney bin will still support him, but the saner folks among us are most assuredly saying that this guy is dirt, but we need to catch up to him and fast - before he decides to keep his "oath" Oslo style or something. That's not a joke either... >more

Newsweek Releases Outtakes From Bachmann "Crazy" Photo Sessions

Teabaggers Feeling All Butthurt; Geezing Old-Guard Feminists Cry "Sexism"


Never mind the fact that here at the offices of the TW, none of us can recall seeing a single photo of Michele Bachmann where she doesn't look flat-out batshit -- not to mention the fact that the old broad pretty much is batshit, and exploits the rage of white working-class America.

The Daily Beast reports:

The straight-ahead shot of Michele Bachmann on the cover of this week's Newsweek, taken by freelance photographer Chris Buck in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, “raises eyebrows,” according to The Huffington Post. “There’s no denying that Bachmann firmly believes what she believes. Some might think she’s crazy because of it. Cover photos like this one help to cement that image,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart. “It’s sexist,” NOW president Terry O’Neill told The Daily Caller. ...>more