Cynicism of the RNC, Confederate Dreams, Karzai the Drug Fiend

Helene Cooper
Dana Milbank
Joe Conason
Mark McKinnon & Lawrence Lessig

"You know what happened in Las Vegas today? Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, was speaking at the alcohol convention in Las Vegas, Nev. Because, I mean, let's face it, nothing says family values like gambling and liquor." – David Letterman

"The iPad has only been out for a few days and it has revolutionized the publishing industry. You can download books, you can read them and store them, and for religious fundamentalists, there's a new app that lets you burn them." – Jimmy Kimmel

Lots of food for thought in the opinion pieces linked above. I have always been attracted to intelligent women, and Helene Cooper is in a class by herself. She is the wizened, old lady that you often see sitting in the front row during Presidential press conferences. Except during the Bush administration, when they tried to bury her and never saved a seat for her. She is one of the few people I'd love to have coffee with and talk to if I ever got to Washington, along with Martin Indyk and Zbigniew Brzezinski... oh, and of course, Dana Milbank, who is the best fly on the wall... Joe conason makes an argument for rebuilding America, and Mark McKinnon makes a case for holding a Constitutional convention...

A couple quick takes on items in the news. Rachel Maddow has a good theory on why stories about Michael Steele are being leaked to the press all of a sudden. She thinks that it is being orchestrated by folks that no longer want him as chairman of the RNC. The original stories about the sex club was leaked to a conservative blog, and from there it spread like wildfire. It's unfortunate that the hiring and firing of people at this level has to be done in the public eye. Michael has had to contend with the cynical fact that the RNC chose him because he was a Black man, in imitation to the election of a Black President. He wasn't chosen because of his qualifications, and the Republicans had been imitating what the Democrats had successfully been doing during the entire election campaign. It's like watching a dysfunctional reality television show, where they hire someone because they know their bad decisions makes good viewing, and we enjoy how appalling they are. Unfortunately, the RNC needs a good therapist, and the healing should be done behind closed doors...

My brother-in-law were arguing about this last night, over the Virginia governor's declaring April as Confederate History month. His family roots are in Tennessee and his reaction was GOOD! My family roots are from Utah and Kentucky, but I disagreed with him; I thought that promoting anything Confederate is silly. I then mentioned that perhaps my great great grandfather, who helped raise a company here in Colorado for the Union Army, well, he may have fought and killed an ancestor or two in my brother-in-law's family... Which is where he admitted that his family had also fought on the Union side....

If that is so, I asked him, why is he so romantically attached to the idea of the Confederacy? I was raised in Los Angeles, close to Hollywood, and instead of choosing up loyalties of the Union or Confederate, I take an outsider's point of view. I know that they no longer exist in real time, and that they are nothing more than somebody's movie. So much of our cultural attachments come from our fantasies, the dreams we have of belonging to a certain subculture or mindset. So, people believe that they are part of a Confederate culture, or that they are cowboys, living the cowboy way, even though the period that we consider to be the wild west that spawned cowboys lasted for a mere 40 years in US history. Most of what we know now have come from movies, and Zane Grey books. Remember that John Wayne was a fictional character, his private life was a lot different than the image he portrayed in public and onscreen. In private, he was a coward, an alcoholic and drug abuser, and a racist who violently abused women...

We all have fantasies about ourselves, most of them are ideals that we could never live up to. If your ideals are rigid, the tension you create from forcing yourself to live on such a narrow path also causes anxiety and guilt every time you fall short. So many politicians who preach a rigid, right wing viewpoint often fall short in public, hence the recent stream of embarrassing events from conservative repubs who preached a strict set of family values. To sum up, Plato was talking about right wingers when he created the parable of the cave dwellers...


To illustrate the cave dweller mentality, here's a real situation. President Obama signing a nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Russia's President Dmitry Medevedev:

And here is how the cave dwellers saw it:

Peter Galbraith has been dissing Afghan Hamid Karzai, most recently in today's Wasington Post. He has also claimed that Hamid is a drug fiend, and that has distorted his personality, his ability to make decisions, and clouded his mind, bwaaa-ha-haaa!

Being a drug fiend is a time honored Middle Eastern tradition, as I touched on yesterday in reporting the shortage of hashish in Cairo. I remember with fondness, back in my college days, of obtaining Afghan or Blond Lebanese hash... Now here is a business opportunity that Colorado can take advantage of. We could use our own medical marijuana growers to begin producing hashish of our own, Rocky Mountain Hashish or Pike's Peaked, and market it throughout the Middle East. Not only do we fill in a cultural need to accelerate their dreams and fantasies, but we help get ourselves out of debt. If we are successful enough, we could put an end to all state taxes, making the Libertarians among us proud and happy...

Sean Hannity asked on his show last night if we were ready for a Sarah Palin / Michelle Bachmann ticket come 2012. I had predicted it several months ago. OK, I didn't predict it, I made the thought in jest, put it as a bumper-sticker in a post. It's weird how a random thought can pick up steam over time and percolate all the way into Sean's brain. I wonder what Sean's brain might look like on drugs: