As the drama queens in congress once again strain credulity with a manufactured crisis and tedious hyper-partisan conflict and Faux News continues to shill for high income welfare, a $3.00 an hour minimum wage and Obama's ultimate failure, leading republican presidential candidate Rick "What did I say wrong" Perry suddenly finds himself losing conservative support faster than hot air out of an overstretched balloon, like the intellectually taxed gas-bag that he is.  Even his prayerful and exclusive connection to the lord himself may not be enough to save him after he not only shot himself in the foot; he re-loaded his trusty sidearm and squeezed off a few more rounds just to be sure. 

Republicans...my response to their response.

Where was I…?  Oh yeah; republicans.   First of all, no re-cap of the State of the Union festivities can be complete without a short pause to consider the Marco Rubio rebuttal, wherein he managed to hit the normal republican bullet points while looking for all the world like Richard Nixon debating Kennedy in 1960.  So much for the savior of the party.  Marco; you’re Cuban man; what’s up with the sweating like a gringo tourista?  If you can’t stand the heat, stay the hell away from cameras and claustrophobic studio spaces full of lights while wearing a navy blue suit.  Like I said, the substance of the speech was bad enough, highlighted by what seems to be a new republican strategy of trying to relate to normal people – the 47% - by trotting out some tired and apocryphal story of their own terrifying escape from a life of poverty by pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of free markets and low taxation – something like that; it got a little bit garbled there towards the end.  Looking incredibly uncomfortable and thereby disingenuous at the same time is hitting the political disaster tri-fecta.

This week, post-SOTU address, also saw the emergence - from whatever rock he lives under - of the Lizard King himself, Dick Cheney, who delivered a lively blast of criticism of Obama’s choices for his national security team, former republican Senator Chuck Hagel and CIA nominee, John Brennan, an avid proponent of drone use and supporter, for the most part, of the Bush/Cheney strategy in the war on terror.  I’m not really a fan of either of these guys, although you have to give Hagel props for being his own man and not hewing to the party line, something for which he is currently paying the price.  Still, hearing Cheney criticize anyone’s foreign policy choices is laughable – like Kevin Costner criticizing people for making bad movies.   This guy thought Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter were the best guys for the job – a couple of two-bit criminals left over from Reagan’s brilliant foreign policy team.  He and Rummie assembled a cabal of ruthless swine who still saw commies under every rock and wouldn’t recognize a home grown insurgency if it flew a plane into a building.

But Cheney is becoming well known for crawling out into the light every now and then to howl at the moon and spew politically charged bile like bird shot from a Remington 20 gauge.   He is only the most high profile, unapologetically delusional member of a party that seems to be in full retreat and disarray and – ironically – intent on continuing to empty their gun into the same boot.  

We have the bleating members of congress yammering on about the danger of approving the Violence Against Women Act, as if losing the women’s vote in the November election by something like 60 – 40 is entirely inconsequential and rooting out the misogynist wing of the party is not as important as just honing their message to women.   It isn’t bad enough that some of the delusional evangelical congress members still are insisting that trans-vaginal ultra-sound should be routine for anyone seeking an abortion and that doctors and other health care providers – who take a Hippocratic oath, by the way – should be free to ration care according to their religious beliefs and that birth control is for sluts.  Nicely played, fellas.  I’m sure you’re on the right track here.

How about some kind of compromise on gun control, an issue where an overwhelming majority of the country favors at least mandatory background checks and a limitation on selling weapons to any hopped-up meth-head who wanders into a convention center on gun-show day.  No, the party is so far in the thrall of gun manufacturers that there is no room for a compromise of any sort.  Surely the brains of the party understand that this is a politically untenable position and only the black helicopter-fearing, bomb shelter building, snake handling apocalypse fans are so paranoid and stupid to deny that it might be a reasonable idea.   But they seem helpless to change the dynamic.

One of the most amazing things to observe is the party’s economic agenda – they seem to have learned nothing from the collapse of the financial system and subsequent malaise made worse by the stubborn insistence that the most pressing problem we face is not the lack of jobs, or Wall Street reform of any significance, or real reform of the tax system but the deficit, a problem that would be solved by nothing more complicated than 10 years of solid economic growth and prosperity driven inexorably by a more prosperous middle class.   The average middle class citizen wouldn’t give two shits about the deficit if the bug-eyed Chicken Littles in the party would just shut up about it.  They want a job and they’ll worry about the deficit…well, never.

Supported by quasi-intellectuals like George Will the party is in a manifest state of denial over climate change, so much so that it begs the question; even if the clearly measurable changes in climate aren’t caused by human activity, doesn’t it make sense to use our most powerful weapon – modern technology – to offset the impacts?   In the end do we really care why the water is lapping around our downstairs windows?  If we know that doing “X” will help, why on earth wouldn’t we do that? 

Of course a summary of state of the republican party wouldn’t be complete without discussing the prolonged game of chicken they’re playing over the sequester and to a lesser extent, raising the debt ceiling.   Paul Ryan and his fellow geniuses continue to insist that the only way to survive is to mercilessly cut everything in the federal budget – except the defense budget, of course, which continues to be sacrosanct and in fact in line to receive more money than they want and they are not shy about asking for the moon.   There is no rational reason for this injection of additional money to a war machine that is currently winding down from two wars but nevertheless, some weird combination of fear, hatred and tiny penises compels the party to be willing to cut education funding, pre-natal care, long term care for the elderly, food stamps, unemployment, aid to the states and cities – pretty much anything that isn’t a corporate hand out or largess towards the wealthy in order to build more nuclear submarines, state of the art interceptor aircraft and other shiny objects that al-Qaeda couldn’t care less about. 

Much of the recalcitrance is simply a knee jerk reaction and a prolonged hissy fit because Obama won a second term, something I am sure was unimaginable two years ago.  McCain admitted that the unprecedented filibuster of republican Hagel’s appointment to Defense was because he was uncooperative and colored outside the lines when he was supposed to be genuflecting before the altar of mindless imperialism and the war in Iraq during Bush’s administration. 

The funniest part of the current state of affairs is that when the cameras are on the republicans complain that Obama isn’t serious, he is absent from negotiations, that he needs to come forward with a proposal, etc, etc.  But when he does proposed something as a starting point for negotiations, Rubio immediately criticizes him for daring to propose legislation without consultation with congress.   It’s so obvious that they are simply continuing the failed strategy of obstruction that cost them the presidency in November.   The good news is that the public seems to be tired of them and amateur idiots like Jan Brewer and others of her ilk are slowly losing their influence and credibility.  So Marco, and you too, Rand Paul, thanks for giving us your opinion and call us when you get your first new idea.

The State of the Union Blues...

I couldn’t watch the State of the Union address last night – watching a roomful of politicians is fascinating in the same way as a monkey playing with a loaded pistol is fascinating.  I just took a quick look but I especially like to watch John Boner’s face as he sits in grim silence behind Obama looking for all the world as if he’s thinking about a bathroom remodel of whether or not to get undercoat applied to his Mercedes.  Sucks to be you, John. The bitter and divisive partisanship at play in Washington and around the country in 2013 makes something like the State of the Union – traditionally a celebration of teeth-gritting cooperation between the parties – into a dangerous opportunity for public embarrassment a la Joe Wilson a couple of years ago.  I kept expecting to hear that Ted Nugent was making inappropriate gestures from the cheap seats.

But as I read the media bilge today attempting to make sense of it all, it sounds as if potentially humiliating moments were limited to some eye-rolling and nodding off, at least until the two official responses – first from the mainstream republicans and then from their bug-eyed knucklehead wing, the Tea Party, represented by Rand Paul, a man apparently suffering from a delusion which has him running for president in 2016.  He reminds me of the old saying; when the going gets weird, the hallucinating man is king, or something like that.

And that’s a good thing, all things considered.  There’s enough embarrassing behavior afoot in Washington already – we don’t need to make it worse through some bizarre spectacle shown on every broadcast television network and half a dozen cable channels watched by millions of citizens; some of them angry and fearful and some of them disillusioned and disgusted but very few of them in the mood to stomach the kind of shit that would be unacceptable in an 8^th grade lunch room. 

For the president’s part, he’s got some explaining to do – not only to his base but to citizens all the way across the political continuum - about his use of drones and – perhaps more scary – the garbled doubletalk that attempts to justify their use.  If you boil it down they’re saying, “Trust us”, and just in case White House hubris is flowing like cheap champagne in the Super Bowl winners’ locker room I’ll get in line to tell Barack and his minions, that isn’t going to work, especially not on those of us who lived through Nixon and Reagan and the dangerous lunatic criminals they each employed in their chosen righteous cause.  Memo to Obama Team; no one trusts you, ex post facto, so you might want to dial back the drone program and re-read the constitution for a few hours.  

Specifically, just because the amped up 5-year olds in congress gave you and your predecessors the right to kick ass and take names all over the planet, wherever your fiery wrath takes you, you might want to check with the rest of the world and take their temperature about it.  Last I heard there were lots of dead people and collateral damage and if you keep playing this mind-numbing game of “Where’s Waldo” with Al Qaeda big shots in the desert it will probably pay to get slightly better intelligence and wait until they go off for a little alone time before you start tossing Hellfire missiles around.  Nothing like dead relatives to give folks more reason to hate us.  Plus if the policy is to hunt them down where they live, it’s only a matter of time until there are drones over Munich and Paris and Virginia Beach. 

And while we’re on the subject of things that aren’t particularly progressive, why do your federal law enforcement geeks continue to kick down the doors of medical marijuana dispensaries, especially those operating according to state laws?  There are lots of real treacherous criminals wandering around Wall Street and K Street and other "respectable" neighborhoods where there is no chance of getting a contact high and where you might dispense some actual justice through the brown-shoed jarheads running the department.  Are these guys all ex-jocks still frustrated that the cool stoner kids took hot girls to the prom or what?  How can you possibly justify this inordinate attention to pot other than using a very strict and thought-free reading of the law of the land.  Anyone who knows anything knows that marijuana and heroin are not remotely in the same class of substance abuse and to continue to pretend otherwise is to further degrade your credibility, something local police departments – to their credit – figured out 10 years ago.  Even if the red-eyed guy standing in line doesn’t really have chronic back pain and just wants to get a buzz, who really gives a shit other than perhaps his mother and father?  On the other hand, the hyperventilating and crazy son of a bitch down the hall who’s been doing crystal all day and now decides he needs to take his 9MM down to 7-11 so he can get some beer and calm down – well we all know that’s a different story.  Go get him and leave the pot heads alone. 

Finally, for Christ’s sake, stop deporting people for a month or so.  I mean, what’s the end game here?  Do you really think that you can get them all out, a la Mitt Romney?  If not then you are discriminating by definition and letting pointy-headed bureaucrats run amok, shipping brown people over the border where they land flat in the middle of a drug war that makes East Oakland look like a pillow fight.  What’s the point?  What are you trying to prove – what a tough guy you are?  Let Rick Perry pretend to be a tough guy.  You’re from Chicago – you’re supposed to be cool like that.  Just stop it unless you really think it’s good for the country to ship the padre de familia back to Mexico, leaving his wife and kids in some hell-hole apartment to eat beans and tortillas and wait for the landlord to come and throw them into the street.  Jesus…

Now as to the republicans…(to be continued).

These are the sensible, repected voices of the right?

You know those recurring dreams where vaguely disturbing things happen to you and it always turns out the same; you fall off a cliff but never hit the ground or you suddenly remember that you signed up for Philosophy 200 back in September and it’s now December and you haven’t been to any of the classes because you forgot all about it?  I thought about this over the weekend after reading a couple of republican hack syndicated columnists jabbering on about how we’re all going to die because of the awful, terrible negro, Obama.   

Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson share an aura of credibility and respectability because they are rumored to have some kind of academic credentials, thus rendering their otherwise inane and repetitious Obama-badgering to be the voice of the loyal opposition.   I, however, have drilled deeply into their Cave of Half-Remembered Treachery and am here to tell you the truth.   Both of these guys are making a tidy living being professional Obama-haters and undiscerning shills for every right-wing interest group from the NRA to Chevron to the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Elks club down on the corner.  So as a public service I am once again going to take my trusty lance to their army of straw men and try to get the smell of red herring out of the house before the company comes over. 

Krauthammer’s latest thinly disguised propaganda piece uses the pretense of dissecting the choice of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary to flog Obama for not hewing to the neo-con vision of American exceptionalism, a grand-sounding euphemism for global imperialism and genuflection to Israel specifically.   He cites three areas where Obama is reverting to his true Obama-ness; military spending, Israel and Iran – sort of a holy trinity of the sacrosanct to the Bill Krystol  / Richard Perle church of world domination.   Citing the 600 billion in automatic, across-the-board defense cuts to be implemented by the sequester, he fails to recognize John Boner being hoisted on his own petard and makes it sound as if that’s Obama’s number, a number which, if implemented, would leave our military tragically neutered and wandering the world stage like a 20 year old hump-back gelding.   His basic criticism – boiled down – is that Obama wants a smaller military, a grim and ominous development for USO bars from Okinawa to Dusseldorf.  But really Chuck – virtually everyone not obsessed with some kind of weird Julius Caesar complex understands that after winding down two wars, the military should be smaller.

Our problem with our belligerent little brother Israel is a vexing one politically.  There are so many Israeli constituencies, from hallucinating evangelicals to the George Patton-wannabe chicken hawks who lay in bed at night with erections thinking about the 7^th Armored Division charging across Kordestan hell-bent for Tehran and the obstinate 17^th century monks huddled in the Grand Mosque plotting our demise.  This is just stupid, as has been American policy towards Israel and Iran for the last 25 years.   Unless you want to sanction bombing them back to the Bronze Age, they aren’t going anywhere.  You’d think we might come to understand that putting a gun to their head isn’t going to accomplish anything but every time an American president whispers the word “negotiate” these guys start foaming at the mouth.  They apparently never got over their personal Peacock, the Shah, being ignominiously kicked out and are determined to make up for it, turning what under other circumstances might just be another Middle Eastern country suspicious of us for our knee-jerk support for Israel into a scary nuclear monster trying to destroy us.  I know lots of Iranian people and generally find them to be friendly but tough negotiators who like “things” just like we do and like the Chinese do and like most people do.  Turning them into cartoonish and mysterious haters of the Great Satan is counter- productive.

I’m personally ambivalent about Israel – I can sympathize with 60 years of jittery nerves, bus-bombings, and widespread hatred from their neighbors.  But I also know that if every time my neighbor’s kid lost a ball in my yard I took a high-powered rifle and shot out their windows I probably wouldn’t get much sleep at night either.   And they need to stop building god damned apartment buildings.

But for my money Krauthammer’s most damning position is his exaltation of the little war criminal, Henry Kissinger, to some kind of semi-deity and Middle Eastern savant.  Never mind that the little bastard sits in his New York City brownstone with security armed to the teeth and is afraid to venture much past Massachusetts for fear of being Pinochet’d into his own damp jail cell.  The little prick probably dreams of extraordinary rendition at night – rotting in some stinking prison in Outer Nowhere is too good for him.   But he’s Krauthammer’s idea of a statesman.

In his latest column for the San Jose Mercury, Victor Davis Hanson – and by the way; it’s a sure sign that someone is a blowhard if they use three names when surely two will do – regurgitates his usual litany of republican talking points, augmented nicely by a veneer of doom and foreboding.  I wanted to punch him but I’ll just hit these one by one instead.

The central premise is that the idea of some kind of gun control is creating panic akin to that which would occur is one of those big-ass spaceships were hovering over New York or Los Angeles, so just-plain-folks are flocking to gun stores, arming themselves to the teeth and checking their supply of Twinkies in the basement for fear the faceless bureaucrats of the ATF will soon be going door-to-door to seize Grandpa’s 12 gauge.  As paranoid fantasies go, this is a good one – some addled gun owners seem to have this as their recurring dream.   He then goes on the blame violent video games and the depraved glitterati of Hollywood for making Adam Lanza go nuts and kill 26 people.  He neglects to mention that Lanza’s mother was the source of the weapon in question and misses the irony of her buying it for self defense purposes.  Vic, if she did have Grandpa’s 12 gauge for protection, young Adam would likely never perpetrated his nightmarish crime and we might not be having this conversation.  Some simple safety measures, eh?  Like maybe a trigger lock or a gun safe and Adam is still in his room playing World of Warcraft and listening to German death metal.

He segues into a rant about health insurance and higher taxes on income over 400k, bemoaning the fact that these valiant embodiments of American bootstrap success are being punished – made hapless victims – and the government is, by implication, going to give their hard earned money to the shiftless among us.  In a particularly obvious falsehood, he sympathizes with those who have been playing fair and buying insurance and who now must subsidize, “many who could, but chose not to buy health insurance”, somehow obfuscating the fact that making those people pay for their insurance or health care one way or another is the very essence of Obama-care.

He ends on this cheery note; “No wonder the fear that a growing government will infringe on such traditional freedoms is stampeding millions of panicky Americans in all directions.”  Of course this is insulting in several ways, the most egregious being the implication that Americans are as stupid as cockroaches, something that – I’m afraid – he and the rest of the right wing intelligencia truly believe down to their souls…or whatever it is that occupies the space where there should be a soul.

My recurring dream is the clamor and screeching of these relentless voices spewing misinformation and outright lies to advance their agenda, cloaked in faux patriotism, racism and contempt for those whose striving hasn’t resulted in “success”.   It’s one thing to want a smaller government – I certainly do.  It’s something else to take that very traditional American ideal and twist it into hatred and fear and treason.  Listening to some of the over-heated rhetoric coming from the sputtering and bug-eyed republican members of the House of Representatives, I am frankly surprised that they haven’t been hauled off by the secret service for a sweaty conversation in some dusty warehouse in Maryland.  To have these ostensibly respected members of the conservative media fomenting this kind of hyperventilating nonsense is regrettable.  I think tonight I’ll take an Ambien and see what happens…

Belly flopping off the fiscal cliff; or how I lost the capacity for rational thought

The laundry list of right wing complaints post fiscal cliff has been amusing to observe – all of the big gun conservative commentators have weighed in on the madness sure to follow what, in their minds was an ill-advised decision to let common sense prevail and maintain some semblance of dignity in the congress.  Now they are in hot pursuit of the Deficit / Liberal / Obama boogie-man with torches held high, in full throat, giving us a good excuse to once again examine and break down the reasons for their concern.  There are many such voices in the media these days but I will try to stick to those who I am pretty confident are not hallucinating regularly but whose partisan freak-flag is flying high just the same.

Victor Davis Hanson, eminent Hoover Institution historian and right-wing hack, published an article recently titled  “2012: Call it the year when dreams died” an ominous sounding rehash of everything wrong in the world and why it is all the fault of Obama or other liberal impulses, all of which have suspicious origins and will surely doom us left unchecked by the wise men of the right – like himself.    And while thumbing through a laundry list of left-wing folly, dismissing legitimate concerns about - as he derisively calls them - “the most vulnerable”, (as if they don’t really exist and are just a figment of deluded liberals’ imaginations), perpetuating the wild-eyed right-wing conspiracy fantasy about Benghazi and justifying the paranoid Brown-shirts leading the NRA, he compares Obama to Nixon in a wild swing and a miss attempt to further demonize him.  Never mind that Hanson probably voted for Nixon both times  he ran - he tries to make the logically questionable case that  the two were equally venal and criminal and worthy of contempt.  This is - of course - laughable in its entirety.  Obama is nothing more than a 1974-vintage moderate republican who only looks like a bug-eyed frothing spawn of Fidel Castro when compared to dangerous lunatics who have seized control of the modern republican party.  

He goes on to somehow equate Obama’s re-election with the crash of the Greek economy, the election of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, the overblown, sputtering fireworks being launched to great and emotional fanfare in North Korea and Kim Slutashian carrying Kanye's love child.  Right, Vince – of course this all makes sense in your twisted world view.  Now climb back up into Hoover Tower and try to lie down for a while with a wet cloth over your forehead and when you wake up, there will be armed guards outside the kindergarten class room where your grandchildren are reading My Pet Goat in honor of the man most responsible for the  current and much ballyhooed “trillion dollar deficits” and Quetin Tarrentino will have seen the light and entered the seminary.

My local paper is full of letters and articles from sputtering right-wingers expressing bitter disappointment, particularly now that John Boner has finally acquiesced and cut a deal “to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff”, a phrase so ubiquitous as be rendered meaningless – the brittle-haired local news readers staring glassy-eyed at the camera could read it over and over and keep a straight face but that’s because they don’t seem to care much about what it is they’re reading.  For most other sentient beings the phrase is met with either a yawn or a roll of the eyes.  Memo to news producers everywhere; endless repetition of hyperbole turns it into just more verbal Fruit Loops for the hungry maw of 21^st century information consumer.  It – by turns – scares us or bores us but it doesn’t seem to motivate the knuckleheads in Washington.

For example, here is a letter suggesting that the deal was “typical Obama; punish the successful and reward the nonperformers”, as if this sums up Obama’s political strategy in one incoherent blast of thinly disguised racism. 

Here’s another lamenting that the “liberal media”, (could that include me???), has successfully cast republicans as “racists, homophobes, sexists, and gun-nuts”, a fairly accurate description as far as I can tell, at least in as much as the most vocal and influential voices on the party are concerned.  If you don’t like being portrayed that way, ask yourself how these clowns get elected?   This correspondent, who is the president of something called, “The Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley”, goes on to blame the media for the fact that the unprincipled representatives he presumably supports, ”betrayed their core beliefs” by voting for a deal with no spending cuts, evidently not paying enough attention to the hated media to notice that the spending cuts are yet to come and are being negotiated as this is written.  I know that the word "negotiation" is not in the republican lexicon anymore, which explains how fuming hatred trumps reasoned political dialogue once again.

The sad fact is that this imaginary crisis and its intellectual companion, raising the debt ceiling, does nothing more than distract the country from the real work of reform that most reasonable observers agree needs to occur.  If I am Obama now and see that the fired up tea party rabble are demanding dollar-for-dollar cuts to match the increase in the debt ceiling, I would propose line items cuts to a defense budget so bloated as to embarrass Jabba the Hut.  Here’s a news flash to the Three Corner Hat crowd; defense takes up over 50% of the federal budget.  Anyone serious about cutting need only take a hard look at the defense budget and the savings start leaping off the page.  Instead Paul Ryan and his ilk fuel their post-puberty obsession with Ayn Rand by suggesting the “nonperformers” be cast aside to fend for themselves so that the deserving can go and join the generals choking down turkey legs, warm stout and Cuban cigars.  

Instead of arguing about how long to extend unemployment benefits, take an aircraft-carrier’s worth of money and go build a bridge somewhere.  Reform the tax code so people and corporations aren’t rewarding for lying through their teeth and maybe you could lower some rates.   Stop wallowing in the institutional stupidity that seems to have spread through Washington like a cholera epidemic and try to form rational thought above the level of a four year old playing with an empty cardboard box.   Instead of screaming “No!!!” hysterically  every time Obama or the democrats suggest voting for something completely non-partisan and innocuous, like the Violence Against Women act, come out from under the covers, look around and see that the world is changing and if you insist of staying there in bed, sucking your thumbs and pouting, you will eventually be no more relevant to the current political process in this country than Henry Kissinger.    

Holiday Disfunction on Capitol Hill...

For the last few days I have been thinking about the increasingly strange place of the public restroom in modern life.   After all, in a 21^st century heretofore characterized by people wandering around relentlessly focused on the tiny screen of their personal devices – cocooned in pixilated armor that shuts out everyone around them – it is worth considering the public restroom, where we engage in a semi-ritualistic and vaguely unsettling communal excretory function in a dizzying variety of settings, from the lobby restroom of the Fairmont Hotel to the ballpark to the skeeviest gas station restroom along the interstate.  Really; what else is there that’s like that? 

 But no; due to the ongoing toxic cock fight in our nation’s capitol, that profoundly important academic exploration will have to wait.  Instead we’re compelled to offer our opinion and commentary on the dramatic and largely imaginary impending confrontation with the dreaded “fiscal cliff”.    The combination of a snappy nickname with months of breathless hyperbole has everyone on edge; consumer confidence numbers were down over 6 points, which is a pretty significant drop, especially considering that most other economic indicators have been positive since the election.  The media has found this to be nearly irresistible – empty headed and vacuous as they are - and so the cable news shows are filled with quasi-experts of every stripe yammering away and offering their opinion, all accomplishing nothing other than to increase national anxiety. 

The one good thing to come of it is the further unmasking of the republican party, exposing them as the clueless band of obstructionist traitors they seem to have become.   Has there been one good idea to come from the right over this issue?  Is there any indication that they might pursue a different solution than that which they have been mumbling and nattering about for the better part of a year?  Do they pay attention to anything other than the marching orders delivered to them from the corporate bag-men and plutocrats controlling their agenda? 

I have been listening to John Boner for two years and he has had literally nothing of substance to say since the 2010 mid-terms.  For him to stand up in front of a forest of microphones and try to claim that they’re the ones doing all of the compromising and making all of the practical and substantive proposals and Obama is the one responsible for the impasse is laughably predictable because he totally lost control of his bug-eyed, frothing, tea-party infested mob who fervently believe that bringing the government to its knees is their holy and patriotic duty.  And if a few unwashed foreigners, old people and shiftless minorities have to suffer because of it, all the better.

For their part, the democrats continue to trot out two of the most demonstrably ineffective “leaders” in the House and Senate in modern history.  Harry Reid looks like a slightly addled and sleepy assistant professor of 16^th century Slavic languages, like he needs to be dusted off and pointed to the podium on the Senate floor where he gets all worked and says “Gosh darn it” and spouts other such inflammatory rhetoric while being completely ignored by 90% of his colleagues, who would rather play cribbage for cigarettes than listen to his jabbering.

 In the House they depend on Nancy Pelosi, possibly the most polarizing figure in an entire congress of loony, hallucinating reactionaries and partisan hacks.  Everyone hates her, probably even her own staff, and her effectiveness was amply demonstrated during the first half of Obama’s first term when she alienated virtually everyone in the country with her cartoonish liberalism and icy bitchiness.   Even Obama probably doesn’t want to take her calls.

In this muddle of self-interest, corruption and treacherous partisanship is it any wonder that nothing happens?   At some point Obama has looked around and said, “One more round of phone calls and that’s it – we can go off the god damn cliff for all I care anymore”.  

If the tea party rabble wants to bring down the government, Thelma and Louise-ing it off the fiscal cliff seems like a good start so why does anyone expect that any kind of deal can be struck that includes them?   Boner needs to man-up, tell them to kiss his ass, and make a deal.  Seventy-five percent of the country wants a deal that includes some cuts and some tax increases.  What is he afraid of – his legacy?  As it stands, his legacy is that he was a hyper partisan but fundamentally ineffective speaker who, when the country needed him most, ignored what was right to score cheap political points that ended up gaining him nothing.  Wow – how’s that sound for the old tombstone, Johnny?   

 If I was you I might think about doing something drastic and outside the box, like getting together with your soul-brother Mitch McConnell and inviting the little fuehrer, Grover Norquist, along with you.  Drop some ruffies in his scotch and leave him tied to the capitol flagpole with his pants around his ankles as a warning to the delusional tea party knuckleheads that they need to get in line and follow your lead.  That’s what leaders do, Johnny – they lead.  If it takes well reasoned convincing or a public flogging, your job is to cut a deal and move on, not to throw up your hands and head for St. Kitts for the holidays.

Where are the statesmen on The Hill – nodding off over Courvoisier and Cubans down at the club, waiting for someone to tell them to go back and get in their chairs?  How hard can it be?   Have these people ever negotiated anything?   Geez – it’s pathetic.

I’ll bet they have really cool restrooms though…

Institutional Stupidity and the Rise of the American Asshole

Institutional stupidity is the tendency for organizations to compartmentalize functions such that no one person or group is fully in control of the output of the organization nor does any one person or group completely understand how the organization works.  Instead each of these parts performs its task according to a set of process rules which – because they are isolated from the whole – are likely to be less efficient as a result.  Indeed, these isolated functionaries are more likely to inadvertently work at cross purposes to the most effective function of the enterprise.

The finest example of institutional stupidity is ubiquitous, on display all around us every day – automobile traffic.  Why do I say this is an example of institutional stupidity?   Think back to the last time you had to go to the DMV for a driving test.  Think about the questions; how far behind the car in front of you should you be when approaching a school bus on the side of the road with its lights flashing?  How many feet should you be from an intersection where you are making a turn before turning on your indicator?  This is an overwhelmingly technical approach to teaching people how to drive that completely ignores the most critical aspect of the art of driving.  It has no philosophical component – it doesn’t address things like common courtesy, cooperation, the big picture.  Instead it focuses on the almost useless minutia and technically “correct” way to drive without teaching the skill of driving.  Why is this?

When it comes to driving, the emphasis on tiny details results in millions of people who can operate a car semi-successfully but who are shitty and dangerous drivers and a menace on the roads; assholes, in other words – completely unconcerned about others, selfish and inconsiderate, as if they are the only car on the road.  Now multiply by 10 million. 

It is because, like so many modern bureaucracies, it is more important to them to follow procedures established by faceless superiors than to actually teach people how to drive.  I call this “window-washing syndrome” – the typical organizational focus on process to the detriment of accomplishing the ostensible goals in the most efficient manner.  In other words, emphasizing the washing of the window in tedious detail while neglecting the goal of actually getting it clean. 

Many mid-level management positions have been eliminated in the 21^st century wired world of commerce after being recognized for the useless drag on innovation and success that they are, bogged down in ass-covering and following procedure and letting the work of the enterprise suffer as a result.   How many times have you sincerely asked someone with whom you are forced to interact and negotiate, “Why do we have to do it this way?” only to be told, “Because we have to do it according to the guidelines” or some equally brain-dead explanation?   Not only is this thoughtless and lazy, it leaves the interpretation of these guidelines to drones and apparatchiks who may not be best able to provide one that is correct.

This fetish with process is rampant and is the single most common characteristic of organizations from Cub Scout troops to giant corporations.   The result is institutional paralysis and stasis if they’re lucky or an orgy of bad decisions if they’re allowed to run free.  The American car industry was, until recently, a fine example of this trickle down stupidity.  Hummers for the general public?  Really?  What were they thinking?  If decisions come about as a result of the Holy Process, then they are unquestioned by anyone and foisted on the public, often with great fanfare.  Where is the intellectual QA?  Absent, because nobody can be trusted to take one look at it and say, “Oh my god, no!”

We’ve just witnessed this at the University of California, an institution with a long and storied tradition of higher learning and one doubtless populated by professors worthy of the various Nobels and Pulitzers gathering dust in their offices but one also run by state bureaucrats plagued by the disease of institutional stupidity.  They have a university-wide logo, dripping with tradition, albeit, somewhat cluttered by modern standards of marketing design, what with the Latin, the candle, an open text book and so on.  So someone gets the brilliant idea to simplify it – a euphemism for dumbing it down – to an amorphous blob of blue and yellow which was met by nearly universal derision.  It was summarily withdrawn in a matter of days and the person or persons responsible for the decision are now hiding under their beds, confused and sucking their thumbs while the regents write the obscenely large check to the marketing design group who designed it. 

Schools are also fertile breeding grounds for institutional stupidity, where teachers – for whatever reason – teach their students how to pass tests rather than how to learn; how to get to the next level without learning much of anything useful on the journey.  Thus we have high schools churning out waves of ignorant, illiterate graduates, all of whom feel that they not only have to go to college, but that they are entitled to do so.  College professors then discover them sitting mute and glassy-eyed in the back rows of classrooms across the country getting “C’s” if the curve is distorted enough or failing miserably if it isn’t. 

Somehow four or five or six years later they emerge with a diploma, dumb as a bag of hammers, and they’re now proliferating into low level jobs in retail and customer service or, if the know someone, at the DMV where this cycle of inbred stupidity flourishes all over again.  They can’t think – all they can do is go down a list and check off those things they’re supposed to do until it’s time to go home and they can get in their cars, crank up their Rhianna CDs and drive home like assholes. 

Why are the people who wait on us in stores and businesses everywhere so terrible at their jobs?  Because they’re stupid.  And deep down they know they’re stupid; they watch Jeopardy and can’t answer a single question.  Knowing that they’re stupid and lots of people are smarter than them pisses them off.  At the same time they feel they deserve better or are too good for the job because – after all – they graduated from college.  They are intellectually lazy, arrogant, dismissive and contentious – assholes, in other words.  Voila!  The cycle is complete. 

Perhaps it’s because of the economic chaos of the last five or six years, but it also seems that everyone is really, really angry.  I was in line the other day when the local post office opened – there was a queue of maybe ten people waiting.  The door was opened by a grey-haired Filipino guy who took his place behind the counter and started waiting on us.  After five minutes another guy in line started muttering darkly, then louder and louder until he was yelling at this poor civil servant – himself a long-term captive in a fortress of organizational dysfunction – who tried to explain that he couldn’t call anyone to help him at the counter, as he was the only counter-person there.  But the angry, entitled guy wouldn’t hear it, and continued to demand that he get someone up there to help him.  A couple of times he could see someone moving around in the back and he yelled at them to get out front and “wait on us”.   Clearly, this guy was an asshole – a self-important nihilist slamming his way around the world with no thought other than what’s important to him.  Humility?  Too threatening.

In August I had a – thankfully – negative biopsy.   I have insurance with a major provider and, other than waiting somewhat anxiously to find out the deductible damage, I figured the professionals at the insurance company and the hospital would take care of the details.  Three and a half months later it is still as tangled as a plate of spaghetti.  I got a letter from the insurance company telling me they were trying to get the hospital to provide documentation that the procedure wasn’t for a “pre-existing condition”.   I thought that was odd given that it was a biopsy – by definition that seemed to eliminate the possibility of it being pre-existing.   When I asked the sweetly drawling customer service rep about that she said, “We’re not sayin’ it is – we’re just askin’ if it is.”  Ah, well that clears it up then, doesn’t it?  And when I asked her why they had to go through this exercise, she said, “Well sir, that’s just what we have to do.”  Is there a tiny spark of intellect in there anywhere?  I didn’t detect one.  

In organizations, they say, shit rolls downhill, meaning the top of the house makes a decision or approves a change and it proliferates down the food chain to the lowest level employees.  But it becomes like that parlor game – I think it’s called Chinese Whispering or something – where each person whispers the same thing to the person next to them in turn and everyone laughs when what comes out at the end is nothing like what goes in at the beginning.  Ha!  That makes for a fun drinking game but is less amusing when applied to corporate governance and organizational behavior.  Shit not only rolls down hill; it gets stinkier and stinkier as it gets closer to the bottom until those charged with implementation are holding their noses and vomiting in the street. 

Rigid adherence to process has evolved in some less-than innovative organizations until it entirely pre-empts thinking.  People not used to thinking regularly, then, can’t be trusted to think for themselves, take responsibility, or make decisions and so more box-checking processes evolve until no one understands why anything is being done anymore – they’re all just doing it and going home.  

We wouldn’t presume to offer a prescription for this daunting problem, as the drones are firmly entrenched with no sign of relinquishing their mindless hold on the cultural and business institutions all around us – or even recognizing that this crushing stupidity is a menace to American civilization as we know it.  Instead, now that we’ve got our blood pressure under control, we are inclined to instead pass along the ubiquitous advice of the English when faced with intractable difficulties; keep calm and carry on.   And don’t let on that you know anything is wrong.