I wanna grow up, to be a politician...

Have you ever heard the expression, “That’s just God’s way of”… blank?  This phrase is ubiquitous and can be used in multiple circumstances and, like much of organized religion, is sort of nebulous.   After all, if god wanted to tell us something, would he be so oblique as to send a hurricane up the east coast in a willy-nilly display of his righteous wrath, sending millions of people heading for cover from Georgia to Maine?  Why would he do that?  What if we didn’t have Glen Beck, Michele Bachman, Pat Robertson and various other people with direct access to him to explain to us that Hurricane Irene was actually a blessing and god’s way of telling us that Washington needs to change its ways and get more in line with republican orthodoxy which reflects, after all, his true wishes. 

Obviously we need to start jailing queers, executing more criminals as fast as possible so their shifty-ass lawyers can’t delay their inevitable and richly deserved deaths, burn down all of the Planned Parenthood offices and hope the devil worshiping abortionists are trapped inside along with the cheap hussies who “counsel” poor innocent young girls about how to hump like minks in the most sinful way using birth control, obviously against his wishes.  Oh,  and exploit the earth and poor working slobs in as meaningful and efficient way as possible.  Amen…

Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to just go on CNN?  Or better yet, Faux News – maybe on Sean Hannity’s show or one of those shows with the air head bimbo anchorpersons reading utterly National Enquirer-esque “news” stories like how Obama got pissed off at the bicycle rental place on Martha’s Vineyard, went home and guzzled a quart of Tanqueray.  Lots of people would see it and, as long as they didn’t mistake it for some random person auditioning on America’s Got Talent he would get his point across in a much more direct way.   He’s God; he would know this, right?  It’s a rhetorical question…

In a follow up to something discussed here last week, a new report says that the pentagon has wasted 30 billion dollars on projects doled out to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last ten years and is in danger of having that number double if the Afghan and Iraqi governments choose not to continue projects already underway after we complete the pull out of American personnel.  This is disappointing and discouraging news but really, is anyone surprised by this?  Turning thousands of bureaucrats and Haliburton wanna-be’s loose in a largely 16^th century country with pallets of cash and telling them, “Here, fix this place.  Make sure there’s plenty of parking…” is an endeavor doomed to failure from the start.  The government is reported to have handed out 140 billion dollars in no-bid contracts in 2010 alone.  So a chaotic country at war with itself, whose main export is opium poppies, and which is run by smiling bands of criminals and thugs, is suddenly supposed to be able to operate a 300 million dollar power plant when they have trouble getting the goats to march single file into the pen at night – what incredible nincompoop thought that was a good idea?  Shit, if you could put a switch by the door that they could flip on the way out it might work but if it’s any more complicated than lighting the boiler in the basement, forget it.  You might want to build a school first.  And oh by the way; in a country run by a pack of thieves, who thought that the first thing they’d want us to build would be a 40 million dollar prison? 

Ironically, this report is coming to light just as Dick “The King’s Regent” Cheney has emerged blinking and muttering from under whatever safe and secure undisclosed rock he’s been under for the last couple of years with a garbled and self-serving memoir full of gaping narrative holes in the best tradition of political apology and blame casting and which mysteriously skips over his chicken hawk draft dodging, hapless assistance to G.H.W. Bush as defense secretary and graft and corruption infused tenure at the afore mentioned Haliburton and goes right to his heroic service and the rightness of his every thought.   OK, Dick, it’s safe to turn off the light now and go back to wherever your medicine is kept. 

And finally, a strategy memo sent to his loyal troops by official court jester Eric Cantor goes a long way towards a not-so-subtle explanation of the tenor of the political debate going forward into next year and it is a foul and swill besmirched document that reeks of the corporatocracy that is currently pulling the strings of the republican party.  While the bible toting wing of the party is doing parlor tricks to keep everyone’s eyes occupied, the corporate slime wing of the party is continuing it’s all out obsessive assault on the Obama administration.  

While Mitt “Am I president yet?” Romney slinks along trying to keep his head down, the nut cases in the republican field get all the headlines with wild-eyed rants about taking back the country and living a godly life and all manner of other distracting rhetoric, including the mantra of “No tax increase for job creators”.  Meanwhile the erstwhile job creators patiently sit on vaults full of cash, not creating jobs while sponsoring eager ring-wing youth like Cantor and Bachman to call for dismantling the “job-killing” EPA so that they are free to foul their own nest to their hearts content as long as it pays the shareholders what they need and they get to go to Paris for a month every spring.   Eric as much as said their goal as a party is to remove “regulatory impediments” to economic growth, a philosophy that sounds ominously like the type of decisions made just before the Deepwater Horizon exploded. 

“By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers," Cantor said in his memo.

This is, of course, transparent bullshit meant to turn the desperate working class unemployed into foot soldiers to turn out Obama in a year and a half and return the rightful king to the throne.  But watch out, Mitt – as Shakespear said,  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  He might have added, it’s really tough on the hair…