Please watch this video. It requires no comment by me.

It explains why this isn’t a joke:

How many Republicans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Go fuck yourself.

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Andy Sullivan at Daily Dish is collecting them:

Why do women hate to date Republicans?

They always SAY they’re going to pull out, but they never do and when it’s a disaster, they refuse to have a Plan B.

How many Republicans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

None. Republicans don’t bother with new light bulbs, they declare a War on Darkness and set the house on fire.

How many Repubs does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Repubs only screw in brothels, not in the light

How many Repubs … ?

None.  The socket welcomes the lightbulb with flowers and chocolates in their world.

Update

Katrina Update

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I blogged about something I was thinking about after having read something MCARP wrote about television and now Westika is blogging about my blogpost …

Anyway, … .

My last post only looks at a small part of that generation and just what little I can seem to observe.  I’m also bored with their apathy, binge drinking/bonging/snorting/whatever and I also think they are misguided.  I wasn’t trying to debate them, only describe them as best I could.

I also “get” the comment by Mary about the kids she observes in Charleston.  There have always been those guys in Izod shirts and Dockers in places like the resort town of Charleston and there are those exact same guys here in the world’s largest small town.  It’s the children of this generation’s Nichols Hills salt-of-the-earth self made assholes.  Right, Flibbertigibbet?  And those girls will also wear the today equivilant of the plaid Bermuda shorts and Peter Pan collared white button shirt.  As we might say in Oklahoma City, there has always been a Harold’s and there always will be.  It’s the prep school clique from Casady and these days Heritage Hall.  The East Coast plays a bigger league “prep school” game than we do, what with Andover and all, but it’s still the same game, even if the stakes are a little  different.  It’s remarkable to me, but the prep kids who find themselves in Oklahoma City or who return to Oklahoma City still run in the same crowds and it’s still a high school social thing in its inveterate and impenatrable clique-ishness.

The ones from my generation are the proud, mindless Republican boors who are currently riding high on petroleum money.  The oil guys are getting $75 a barrel and acting like they invented wealth.  The natural gas guys are all trying to be Aubrey Mc. at Chesapeake and spending money like they were billionaires.  They all go to MetroLifeNonDenominational TV Church and are holier than thou, youbetcha.  And their kids have the same arrogance plus the natural “Know It ALL” attitude of brash young men fresh from their victories on the high school lacrosse playing fields.  And, of course, THESE kids are optimistic and all about their current love lives/joining of contiguous empires as the nobility always has been.  These kids, born on third base, wake up believing they’ve just hit a triple.  No wonder they are optimistic.  Fresh faced, pink cheeked little darlings.  Not as metaphor, but literally, they are George Bush.  He is now and always has been the Yale cheerleader.  The “gentleman’s C” that comes from having Prescott Bush endow a whole building.  Skull and Crossbones doesn’t stop at graduation.  They only have one personality that they all share.  Fanatically sure of themselves, believing that what they believe is literally divine, they are now and always have been insufferable.  They run things, they know it and they are, by reason of wealth and status and position, invulnerable to the vicissitudes of the life of the rest of us.  When we want a lot of money and are willing to sacrifice and work our asses off in the struggle for the legal tender, these people are who we want to be and who we want as children.  Yeah, I know.  YOU would be different.  You would be the self made rich guy in  Nichols Hills who ISN’T the asshole.  You would be one of the down-to-earth Nichols Hills guys that Flibbertigibbet sees at Nichols Hills Plaza Starbucks.  Right.

Well, that’s exactly who these kids want to be.  They want to be rich and right.  Not only do they see no obstacles, they see this as their birthright. 

While I think the local faux nihilists and Fox News preps are both statistically significant on the youngster’s population pie graph, I think they still represent small slices.  I don’t know enough about hip hop culture, Latinos or lots  of other young adults to even pretend to be able to capture their generation.  I can say I’m glad to know Westika and Pink Lady and a few others in that age bracket and the ones I know much about at all seem like they are more “real” than either of the two groups I’ve described.  So, I have hope.

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MCARP has a post on 3:40 a.m.  about Court TV becoming TruTV that got me thinking.  You know how dangerous it is between my ears, but I went there anyway because fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Anyway, I thought about how not having a television to speak of and without cable, I’m sometimes at a loss to understand popular culture and its references.

One thing I think I do understand about the youngest adults I’ve observed, at least a portion of them.  I’m thinking now about the customers at Sauced, Sidecar and Starbucks in the under 30 age group, but still likely out of high school.  The guys are wearing cargo pants that hang down below their underwear waistband and are cut off below the knees, sneakers and a thrift store shirt that is often too small.  They are pierced and tattooed.  They may or may not carry a backpack with an iPod and a laptop.  Some of these fashionistas also wear all black and all very tailored, topped with a snap brim or porkpie hat.  The music-driven upper middle class nihilist who actually knows the word instead of just not giving a good flying rusty f***.  All the girls wear thrift store clothes and these are often deliberately crappy and often from the era of their parents’ Baby Boomer salad days.  Ugh.  The 70s and 80s.  They think school is stupid because anything you’d want to know, you can just Google.  They are substantially right.  They are also pierced and tattooed.  They wear scandalously short skirts and then modestly put leggings on underneath, or even a pair of jeans or perhaps they’ve perfected a “look” of their own eccentricity. 

They are very open about sexuality and gay, bi, whatever is just that: what ever.

I think I “get” part of what’s happening with this subgroup about whom I generalize so broadly.

They are saying that they are never going to be Lindsay Lohan or some such in the way they look, they aren’t going to try, they want to be judged on something else altogether.  They are asking we look past looks and judge them on “better” values, at least a different value.

I think they are telling us that the whole Clinton thing all the way through Mark Foley is just bullshit.  Sex just isn’t that important to get all twisted up.  Sexuality is not a lifestyle or a choice, it’s just who you are and how you’re wired.  Get over it.

They think our obsession with education is misplaced and that school is not relevant to their future.  You may think that’s wrong, and maybe it is, but it’s the view I think they have.  They may go to school and do well, but they have no respect for school, even when they are playing the game by all the rules, because they do respect relevant education.  Not a contradiction.  They don’t see school as a particularly efficient delivery system.

They’re sick of our materialism.  Having clothes and a car and a house matters, but there are limits.  The consumption can become conspicuous.  I think they see materialism much like they see sex.  It’s important, it matters, but jiminey cricket folks, let’s have some balance and perspective.  I think there’s vegan and green versions of this.

I also think they are somewhat nihilist.  I think they really do think that they’ve been left a bad hand and that it’s beyond their ability to, shall we say, relieve life of its quality of suffering.  It — whatever it may be — just really doesn’t matter.  Go to school make good grades or don’t, it doesn’t matter.  Dress in clean clothes or not.  Doesn’t matter.  I don’t think they are true nihilists.  I don’t think they are as blase as the existentialists nor even the “beats” they sometimes mimic in their black attire.  Very few of them are philosophic about it.  I think they are saying, however, that a great many things we grownups think matter, just don’t.

This is not my point of view of life, but I can’t say it’s wrong.  I might bemoan these messages I think I’m “hearing” from this group, and I might wish they were more optimistic about their future.  They say Social Security will fail in 2017 and there’s nothing we can do about it and the world will come to an end, amen.  About when these kids are in their prime, well, there won’t be any prime because there won’t be any oil and the clouds are going to rain fire anyway.  We’ve told them that this is their future.  This is not likely to make one optimistic.

And even if it kills them, all this Social Security and terrorism and environmental collapse, even if it kills them, it still doesn’t matter because it seems sure that we’re all going to hell. 

We grew up in a great country and we were astride the world.  They are growing up in a time when we are the warmongers of the globe. 

Politics is corrupt and Hollywood is decadant, and who cares and why not.  If Mom and Dad can vote Republican, go to church and still get drunk, does it really matter what anyone says they believe or think?

Look.  We’re a hulluva lot more powerful and rich than they are and we can’t keep guns and drugs out of schools and we can’t stop airplanes from crashing into buildings.  What the hell do you expect of them?

Or, maybe it’s just plain old teenaged oppositional behaviors.  That whole kill your father Oedipus thing.

Nevermind.

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President Bush again today said he would continue to be in charge of the Iraq war, would “stay the course” until Petraeus’ report in September, threatened a veto on any legislation shutting down the war, and all in a context of eroding Republican support in the U.S. Senate.

And, to give the neocon devils their due, some parts of their present (ever shifting) position has some validity and is reasonable, even if I reach a different conclusion.  Part of the problem, and what the rightwingnut/FauxNews/neocon/partisan/deadenders 27 percent don’t seem to get is that we no longer trust anything whatsoever that the Bush administration and especially the president himself EVEN WHEN THEY TELL US THE TRUTH.  Yeah, I know, I’m shouting.  I’ll take a breath.

Here’s the deal as far as I’m concerned:  let’s say that it’s exactly the right judgment to wait until September and make a judgment at that time about the “way forward.”  We don’t trust Bush to deal with the war issue in an honest and straightforward way when it’s time for new judgments.  Meanwhile, we have to start planning to get troops out now while we still have an operating fighting force.  We simply have not seen enough competency at the highest levels to believe that they are up to the job, no matter what the job may be.  GW and Co. have yet to be right and competent about anything whatsoever from beginning, when they lied about WMDs, to Fallujah, the civil war, the connection to al Qaeda, the number of troops that would be needed, reconstruction efforts, you name it.

We’ve earned the right to make an independent judgment because we’ve given him everything he asked for over a span of time that was enough for FDR to defeat fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and destroy Imperial Japan.  We can’t capture Osama bin Lauden, the most wanted man in the world, because he’s hiding IN OUR MAJOR PARTNER IN THE WAR ON TERROR?!!!??!!!

They had a chance to do that in the past year and Rumsfeld panicked and backed out because he was afraid of what the tyrant and military dictator Musharref might think?

Chickenhawk cocksuckers.  But they blistered Clinton’s ass for just raining a couple of Cruise missles on his believed hiding place.  It’s all Bill’s fault, you know.

they really believed Grover Norquist, antitax neocon nutjob, when he said he didn’t want to starve the government to death, he wanted to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.  They know how to tear things down and criticize and bitch, but they simply do not know how to govern. 

They couldn’t get the Congress to repeal the Food and Drug Act, but they could put in political appointee leadership that had the purpose of keeping the FDA from doing what it is supposed to do.  They couldn’t get the Congress to rig elections, but they appointed folks to the Justice Department whose job was to rig elections.  Same with Civil Rights and Fair Housing. The Environmental Protection Agency became a shill for factories and polluters, miners, timber cutters and oil drillers. 

Their very purpose was to make government disfunctional on every conceivable level. 

We have not yet begun to deal with what it will take to repair the damage wreaked by 8 years of Republican rule under the Bush/Cheney Imperial Presidency.

They have packed the courts with lifetime appointments of men who are determined to change the law to fit a particular religious view as God’s law that “trumps” all other legislation by man including the Constitution.  God help us.  Save us from these self-appointed “righteous” men who pretend to dispense Justice.

We must rebuild our precious Bill of Rights.  I’m not sure that anything short of a new Constitutional Convention can repair the damage that’s been done to our common and ordinary rights and human dignity.  We must act immediately to repudiate torture.  It’s barbaric, unnecessary, brutal, ineffective, a horror to those of us who retain some semblance of civilized thought.

We must rebuild a scientific community for the FDA, NASA, NOAA and dozens of other technical agencies.

We will have to rebuild the Department of Justice from scratch.  It’s mortally wounded as it stands today.

We will have to rebuild our military while continuing some combat-type struggle on a worldwide basis, on some level, against terrorism and other threats.  True defense should be our first priority, which will call for many more domestic safety measures to upgrade port, emergency, airline, immigration, passports.  We should not preclude some offense outside our borders when we can be effective and efficient.  Isolation will not be an answer.

It will take my grandkids’ lifetimes to deal with the financial mess we’ve got on our hands.  Budget deficit, trade deficit, Social Security … intractable issues at best.

Those who don’t want socialized medicine should remember that we had a good private health care system when employers routinely provided coverage to workers, but the reason we have a health care crisis is that they stopped doing that.  Our national standard of living, the day to day struggle for the legal tender that most Americans face, has been slashed by corporations who give their CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars annually and a pat on the back for accomplishing our impoverishment.

The obscene concentration of wealth in the face of rising poverty, bankruptcy, foreclosures makes me want to grab a red flag and go to the barricades except that it isn’t Paris in 1968 and I’m no longer quite that Romantic and idealistic.

We will never be rid of hypocricy, but we must put an end to the bribery and corruption in government.  I suppose there will always be SOME corruption in politics, but there are too many billions of dollars at stake of OUR money to let campaign finance dollars get traded for government contracts.  Of course, Halliburton should be investigated, but we need to look into this mercenary army we’ve created in the Middle East.  Earmarks (‘Nuff said). 

We’ve got to rebuild the CIA and State Departments.

Homeland Security is a complete clusterfuck and it’s taken FEMA with it.  Katrina recovery is also a complete clusterfuck.

Then we come to the environment and dependence on foreign oil.  This is not an easy problem and there is widespread agreement that it’s time to get serious about working on it.  It will be difficult, regardless of any politics, it’s going to be hard.

I think it’s time to save some money by declaring victory on the war on drugs and getting out of Columbia.  Let’s treat it as a public health problem, decriminalize it and focus on something else.

The mind fairly boggles at the enormity of the agenda.

I think what you and I must do is ask the right questions.  We must ask presidential candidates whether they agree with the “unitary executive” theory advanced by Dick Cheney.  We must ask their thinking about judicial appointments.  We must ask what they see as America’s place in the world: hegemon?  good neighbor?  warrior?  Christian?  Will you keep pre-emptive war as a foreign policy cornerstone?  What is your first environmental priority?  What role do you see for your vice president?

We cannot risk another failed presidency like this one.  I only hope we survive this one with enough left to pick ourselves back up.

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My little sis complains about my jerimiad against those who want to “fix” me about my health habits.

Turns out that my smoking is preventing me from getting Parkinson’s Disease.

Nyah Nyah Nyah

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There are 2 billion mices in China that need me to chase them and eat them, but Jhon won’t let me out of the house.

I shall officially protest the imperfection of the universe.

ex Imperium Sinatra

If you want to know what the rightwing response is to the NY times editorial seeking an end to the Iraq war, try Surrender Now?, and be sure to read the comments. 

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My most heartfelt thanks to the large number of friends who made this past birthday weekend so much fun.  I want to especially thank my niece, who appears to have been procreating about the time of my birthday because my sister, who many of these friends met or became reacquainted recently, will soon be a “Mimi”.  Congratulations!

Thanks to the twin birthday friends, The Gary and Osager, for deliciously funny cards.  Thanks to Cindy for the tie, it’s lovely.  The lovely Juliet threw me a bin 73 party and it was a delight.  There are really too many to name.

I hope some of you have noticed that I’m doing more short posts/links these days and trying, really trying, not to do so much of the long screed kind of thing.  I hope you enjoy the stuff I find on the net as much as I do.  Since I only have dial-up, it just takes too long to post pictures and videos, but my birthday resolution is to get faster lines.

This year, I feel the years.  This year, my body has finally told me in no uncertain terms that a new way of behaving is imminent.  Exercise, better diet and a no-shit try one more time to quit smoking.  I hit the wall.  Maybe I’m finally ready to grow up a little more.

Besides, I’m sick and tired of the bad habits.  I’m only slightly less tired of the incessant attempts by the “fixers” in my life telling me I mmuuussstttt do these things.  Shut the fuck up, you controlling co-dependent cocksuckers.  Go rehab a house or restore an old car or something and leave me the hell alone.  If I manage to do any of these things for myself, it’ll be despite your “help”.  Besides, if I do them, you’ll just find some other way I don’t meet your approval and start trying to fix that.  Like Sophie Tucker said to her husband Phil when he complained her chest was flat:  Get off my back.

I feel better now, don’t all y’all?

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This brief video is the very height of the advertising art.  simply brilliant.

Funny, thought provoking and memorable.  Except, what was the name of that company?  German, I think.  Oh, well.

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