Ich bin ein Arizonan

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." - President Ronald Reagan

"Build the dang fence." - John McCain

"Ich bin ein Berliner." -John Kennedy has become "We're all Arizonans now." Sarah Louise Palin


Times have certainly changed. John McCain has changed from Maverick war-hero independent thinking pragmatic centrist to sycophantic Tea Party chasing weird guy hanger-onner from Arizona. Sarah Louise Palin (anagram - Lush Paranoia Lies) has morphed from unknown Alaska right-wing small-town small-time politician to nationally known opportunist uber-rich celebrity hack, ultra-right-wing, incoherent, inchoate Tea Party anger spokesperson that even Alaska doesn't want as a future President. Someone else writes books for her and she gets rich..... The corporate and Fox News organized, financed, and sponsored Tea Party conglomeration of disaffected angry at everything and everybody is perceived as a populist grass roots movement. The right wing media machine is running at full BIG LIE speed and the "lamestream" media (great phrase coined by SLP) passively reports and, therefore, promulgates the repeated misinformation spread by FOX and Friends. Glenn Beck gets rich with his loony shtick. What a country!

But it is contradictory anger: anger at TARP and bailouts of financial institutions and auto companies is accompanied by filibusters against fixes of the problems. Conservative right wing Republicans are now targeted by Tea Party candidates - to replace with even more conservative righter-wing Republicans. Be careful about how much anger you try to stir up would be a message the Republicans might heed in the future. Constitutional Rights are selectively embraced and/or rejected -- i.e., We should be able to sell terror suspects on Watch Lists and No Fly Lists weapons and explosives, but we shouldn't be required to read them their Miranda Rights after they are arrested for their crimes. And we should be able to imprison American citizens without charges for as long as we want........

Dr. Frankenstein's monster and Oppenhemier's famous prophecy come to mind: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

So, as we head down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole to the Tea Party, I guess we'll see in the election cycles ahead whether the Ouroboric, snake eating its own tail, "epistemically closed," extreme right-wing devours itself in its undifferentiated "infancy experience" unfettered by the attempt to actually make something work fizzles out or gains strength.....or whether cooler pragmatic heads prevail. President Obama has always struck me as the adult in the room......

Help, I've fallen off the Coffee Party "civility pledge" wagon again. I need a Coffee Party sponsor.


Regards, Bud